POP3 Recovery Thunderbird even with empty Mail Folder
Hi there,
I have deleted a POP3 Email Account from Thunderbird (in order to use it as IMAP instead) and thereby accidentally checked the box for deleting my emails. I thought first that deleting them locally is not an issue, because I have them on the server. But guess what, Thunderbird had downloaded all emails from that account and always emptied the inbox on the server.
Thus, now my inbox for that Email account as IMAP is empty, except for some fresh emails.
I have read here in the forum that I might be able to find the emails in the profile folder and then the Mail folder. But there is no subfolder in Mail that is named pop3.something.
Thus I thought that my emails from that account are lost for good. However, today I searched for an old email, and it popped up in the search results, including the body. Clicking on it did not open the email, but the fact that it appeared in the search results of Thunderbird gives me some hope that I can still recover my emails.
Does anyone has an idea how?
I mean, if they are in the search results, the data must be stored somewhere, right?
All Replies (6)
Nope the global index has been left in a basically corrupted state.
See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-database
That will reset the search database. It will remove these residual bits of your mail stored in the search index.
My goal is not to remove the mails stored in the search index but to read it out. How can I do that?
You have read what is stored. The search results are it. If you clicked to remove your mail when you removed the account there is nothing to recover. The global database does not contain whole emails, only text snippets.
Yes, text snippets and some metadata. How and where can I read that out from the global database?
You can try and build bits from an SQLIte database editor. But I have looked at those tables and really I think you are wasting your time. I use this to examine SQLite files https://sqlitebrowser.org/dl/
Really the best bet would have been a file undelete tool applied to the hard disk. But the longer after the event the less likely you will be able to recover the folder and files you deleted. This is the result of a quick google search, but it illustrates what 'I am talking about. https://www.ntfsundelete.com/
Basically you wioll be looking for folders deleted from the mail directory in your profile.
Please close Thunderbird and copy the entire profile to a usb drive before you start. This sort of stuff has a habit of going bad in the blink of an eye.
Thanks. That is helpful.
I recovered some msf files now and copied them into Local Folders of Thunderbird. How can I make Thunderbird read these .msf files?