Is there any way of retrieving the email addresses that were lost?

What exactly are you asking for? Only you can tell whether there is still something which can be recovered from the broken disk.

The easiest thing to do would be to restore a recent backup of your Thunderbird profile. That would of course assume you took the effort to create one in the first place.

Thanks for your comment. My problem started after we had a lightning strike in our back yard. For the next couple of days each morning when I turned on my desktop computer there was a long period while the hard drive was being repaired (according to the dialog box on the screen) Then (Win 10) I got the initial screen, input my password and got a screen with a message "We can't sign into your account" with a message how it might be corrected. Followed all the recommendations, no joy. Computer shop charged me $130 and when I got it back some apps, many files were gone. My external hard drive covered most but my Firefox bookmarks and Thunderbird address book were bare. i've since learned about the profiles for both which I will now set up. Am resigned to the fact that I need to rebuild both from scratch. Thanks for your effort to help. cheers John H