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Accidentally deleted all emails in the Inbox

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  • Last reply by david

My internet service provider is Optimum. I do have an optimum account for my email. But my account for my emails uses Thunderbird. I kept getting alerts that I couldn't move emails to specific local folders to save. So, I went into my optimum account and deleted the emails in my inbox, junk and trash. when I returned to my thunderbird account, all of my emails in my inbox that I have already read, are gone. Wiped clean, no emails any longer. Is there someway to retrieve these lost emails?

My internet service provider is Optimum. I do have an optimum account for my email. But my account for my emails uses Thunderbird. I kept getting alerts that I couldn't move emails to specific local folders to save. So, I went into my optimum account and deleted the emails in my inbox, junk and trash. when I returned to my thunderbird account, all of my emails in my inbox that I have already read, are gone. Wiped clean, no emails any longer. Is there someway to retrieve these lost emails?

All Replies (1)

First, I am not a super guru, but there are others around. Here are my thoughts: if the folders have not been compacted, the actual content may still be in the inbox folder. Try this:

  1. click help>troubleshootinginformation
  2. scroll to 'profile folder' and click 'open folder'
  3. exit thunderbird
  4. you are in the profile. for imap account, open the imapmail folder and then the account folder. You should then see inbox and inbox.msf
  5. if the account was POP, then do the same for the mail folder
  6. now, open the inbox file with notepad or other simple text editor
  7. Locate your deleted email by searching the file
  8. Locate the line before your email text that reads "X-Mozilla-Status: 000x" (where 'x' is anything but 0). Change the number to four zeros (″0000").
  9. repeat for each message to recover
  10. Save the document and exit the text editor
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