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Accidentally deleted account and achived emails

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  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by W Faze

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Like many people recently, I was having difficulty connecting to my ATT account. That has been solved--thank you! But while struggling with it, I thought that if I deleted my account on TB and recreated, it would help. It didn't, and now it appears that I have l;ost all my saved and archived email. Is there any way I can restore it? I have not emptied my computer's recycle bin yet.

Like many people recently, I was having difficulty connecting to my ATT account. That has been solved--thank you! But while struggling with it, I thought that if I deleted my account on TB and recreated, it would help. It didn't, and now it appears that I have l;ost all my saved and archived email. Is there any way I can restore it? I have not emptied my computer's recycle bin yet.

Chosen solution

What type of account did you delete ? If you Removed a POP account then all the pop account data would still be in the profile folders.

If you have already created a new pop account then try the following to point it to look at the original pop account.

  • Right click on pop account in Folder Pane and select 'Settings'
  • Select 'Server Settings'

Bottom right you will see 'Local directory:' Make the window wider so you can read all the text. It will show a text box with info that looks something like this:

  • C:\Users\user account name\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\abc3h802.default\Mail\mail.domain-1.com
  • click on 'Browse' button

It will open a window showing contents of the current selected folder eg: mail.domain-1.com

  • Go up the directory one level to see contents of the 'Mail' folder
  • select the old pop account name folder which may look the same but no number eg: mail.domain.com
  • click on 'Select Folder' button

Do not worry if you get wrong one as you can easily repeat these actions to reselect. Restart Thunderbird.

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Chosen Solution

What type of account did you delete ? If you Removed a POP account then all the pop account data would still be in the profile folders.

If you have already created a new pop account then try the following to point it to look at the original pop account.

  • Right click on pop account in Folder Pane and select 'Settings'
  • Select 'Server Settings'

Bottom right you will see 'Local directory:' Make the window wider so you can read all the text. It will show a text box with info that looks something like this:

  • C:\Users\user account name\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\abc3h802.default\Mail\mail.domain-1.com
  • click on 'Browse' button

It will open a window showing contents of the current selected folder eg: mail.domain-1.com

  • Go up the directory one level to see contents of the 'Mail' folder
  • select the old pop account name folder which may look the same but no number eg: mail.domain.com
  • click on 'Select Folder' button

Do not worry if you get wrong one as you can easily repeat these actions to reselect. Restart Thunderbird.

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Thanks, I managed to solve it, rather ingeniously, I think. Main problem is, I find Win 10 very frustrating and counter-intuitive, and I have problems finding anything, files or settings, on it. Eventually I found my old folders, saved them onto a flash-drive; but then I couldn't import them into the new profile, or find where the new profile folders were stored. On my new profile, I created a dummy folder, "E-mails from Beppo," did a search to see where it was located, then copied my archived files back from the flashdrive into that location. Worked like a charm!