recovering lost Thunderbird emails
A long-standing university email account that I accessed through Thunderbird was recently mistakenly deleted by the institutional administrator and all its contents deleted. The institution subsequently established a replacement email account for me, but the institutional Help Desk said the emails from the original account had been erased and could no longer be accessed from their server. Fortunately, I had Thunderbird configured to save all my emails on my local machine, so that even though I can no longer log in to the original email account, I can still view the emails in my Thunderbird installation (i.e., open and read them), even though every instance of starting up Thunderbird calls for me to supply the password for the original account (which I can no longer do). So I just close that dialogue box and can still see the emails stored locally on my machine.
I would like to move (or copy) these emails to a location where I can still access them off line and view them in the original organizational scheme (if possible), under the headings "subject," "correspondents," and "Date." But the Thunderbird "archive" feature seems to require that I be able to log on to the institutional server under the original account, which I can no longer do. The only existence of these emails is on my local computer.
Is there a way for me to preserve these emails as an accessible archive/repository so that I can continue having access to them, even though they are no longer in a functioning email account?
Thanks for any suggestions/help.
Выбранное решение
Thank you for the advice. I finally decided to move the entire account to a subfolder in my regular g-mail account (that has nothing to do with the institution (I was able to do this b/c all the messages were stored locally on my machine). I image what I did was more labor-intensive than what was recommended, but it seems to have worked.
GAS
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This should work, assuming the messages are in the folder: - exit thunderbird - in windows file explorer COPY (not move) the archive folders (e.g., 2023, 2023.msf) to Mail\Local Folders - restart TB and they should appear - if all is well, you can then delete the defunct account.
Выбранное решение
Thank you for the advice. I finally decided to move the entire account to a subfolder in my regular g-mail account (that has nothing to do with the institution (I was able to do this b/c all the messages were stored locally on my machine). I image what I did was more labor-intensive than what was recommended, but it seems to have worked.
GAS
david said
- restart TB and they should appear
Thank you David, this worked for me. I have several sets of old MSF files spread across two machines. I can now collect the lot and (sigh!) start working through them. Cheers, Chris