I have had a motherboard crash. My data still exists and is accessible if i hook the old drive up as an external drive on another system. Old Op sys is xp media addition. Bought new system with windows 7. I can locate the email profile in the app data folder on the old drive but copying it into the new systems profile folder did not work. Thunderbird acted like i was setting it up for the first time. On the old drive I can see files that correspond to email folders i had previously and it appears that the emails still exist due to the size of the files. It took several minutes to copy the profile folder to a flash drive. If i click on a thunderbird folder on the old drive the system asks what program i want to use. i steer it to thunderbird and a window opens like i want to send an email. I took the old drive and made it the boot drive in another system. It booted but when i opened thunderbird it acted like there was no profile at all. Started asking questions like it had never been set up on an email account before. From what you see here is it still possible to get either my emails, or at least my address book back?

Question 2. is it not the law now that all companies keep an archive of emails for a certain length of time? 3 or 5 years? Might i be able to get them to release the archived emails back to me?