Trying to recover lost emails.
I have an email account with BlueHost, which also hosts my web domain. A couple weeks ago I stopped receiving emails and contacted BlueHost tech support. The agent had no clue why I wasn't receiving email. She said "Can you please click on acocunt actions and remove the account and re-addd it. [sic]" I did that, and I was again able to receive emails. But then all my old emails -- sent and received -- had disappeared. BlueHost was able to restore my Inbox emails back to May 19, but was not able to recover any Sent emails. I have a backup of my Thunderbird directory from April, but would like to recover all of my old emails, which apparently still exist because my current Thunderbird Profiles directory contains files corresponding to deleted email folders. For example, my Inbox had a subfolder -- call it ABC -- that was deleted and is no longer visible in my Inbox, but I can find files ABC (no extension) and ABC.msf in my Inbox.sbd folder. My Sent.sbd folder also contains files ABC and ABC.msf. These folders are in C:\Users\aaa\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\aaa.default\Mail\mail.aaa.com (with "aaa" representing my personal identifiers). mail.aaa.com contains files Inbox, Inbox.msf, Sent, and Sent.msf, which seem to contain my old emails. (Inbox is 132,151 KB and Sent is 289,829 KB, and the file dates are from a couple weeks ago, when I removed and re-added the email account.)
Is there a way that I can recover the old emails?
Chosen solution
Some detective work may be needed. Click help>troubleshootinginformation, scroll down to 'profile folder' and click 'open folder.' You should now be in the aaa.default folder. Click the Mail folder to see what's there. If a POP account, the desired input and sent folders should be visible. In thunderbird, is the POP account active? What you could do is: - exit thunderbird now - copy the inbox and sent folders (ignore the msf entries) and paste them into the Mail\Local Folders folder - restart thunderbird and the folders should be visible. - let me know how that goes.
Read this answer in context 👍 0All Replies (4)
If I understand properly, the old mail is on your PC, not on the Bluehost account. Those can be restored back to the online account, but I am not sure if that is your question. Please provide more detail. Thank you
Right. As I indicated, the old mail is on my PC in the C:\Users\aaa\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\aaa.default\Mail directory. But when I run Thunderbird I don't see any of the old emails.
One thing I just noticed is that there is an ImapMail directory parallel to Mail. ImapMail appears to contain all my current emails (inferred from the Date modified). Thunderbird apparently sees what's in ImapMail, but doesn't see Mail. I would like to somehow make the emails in the Mail directory accessible in Thunderbird.
Chosen Solution
Some detective work may be needed. Click help>troubleshootinginformation, scroll down to 'profile folder' and click 'open folder.' You should now be in the aaa.default folder. Click the Mail folder to see what's there. If a POP account, the desired input and sent folders should be visible. In thunderbird, is the POP account active? What you could do is: - exit thunderbird now - copy the inbox and sent folders (ignore the msf entries) and paste them into the Mail\Local Folders folder - restart thunderbird and the folders should be visible. - let me know how that goes.
That worked. I copied everything (including *.msf) into Local Folders, and from there I can copy the emails into my working Inbox and Sent folders. Thanks.
You must log in to your account to reply to posts. Please start a new question, if you do not have an account yet.