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Loss of saved emails after deleting and reinstalling account in Thunderbird

I-Thunderbird Email and messaging
Rick replied
marlinrprice
marlinrprice

First, thank you for being here. I am old, 77, and am not the best computer genius. I have no 16 year-old kids to call and fix grandpas computer. This morning, my Thunderbird had only two messages in the inbox, but checking my phone, there were the typical 25-30. Thunderbird had a pop up saying SMTP did not recognize my password, so I re-entered it and no change, still says not recognized. (Checked to make sure of password - was using correct one). Being half-smart, I decided to delete the email account and reinstall it. I did, and it works with all the emails from my phone showing up. Unfortunately, all the historical emails (saved for years in inbox folders) are gone along with the folders. These were things like reservation confirmations, receipts, instructions on how to reset something... Are these now gone forever or are they recoverable? I cannot remember if I ever set up a backup system for Thunderbird. When I first started using, I was able to import all the folders and stored emails from Outlook. Any advice or instructions would be appreciated.

First, thank you for being here. I am old, 77, and am not the best computer genius. I have no 16 year-old kids to call and fix grandpas computer. This morning, my Thunderbird had only two messages in the inbox, but checking my phone, there were the typical 25-30. Thunderbird had a pop up saying SMTP did not recognize my password, so I re-entered it and no change, still says not recognized. (Checked to make sure of password - was using correct one). Being half-smart, I decided to delete the email account and reinstall it. I did, and it works with all the emails from my phone showing up. Unfortunately, all the historical emails (saved for years in inbox folders) are gone along with the folders. These were things like reservation confirmations, receipts, instructions on how to reset something... Are these now gone forever or are they recoverable? I cannot remember if I ever set up a backup system for Thunderbird. When I first started using, I was able to import all the folders and stored emails from Outlook. Any advice or instructions would be appreciated.

All Replies (1)

Rick
Rick
  • Top 25 Contributor

Hi Marlin,

Was your old account a POP account or an IMAP account?

If it was a POP account, I believe that your messages are lost for good because those messages were stored only on your computer and were deleted when you deleted your account. Unless you have a back-up copy of the files.

If it was an IMAP account, you can probably access your messages by subscribing to the folders in Thunderbird because the messages are still on the server. You can see if this is the case by signing in to webmail at your e-mail service provider's site and seeing if those folders appear or by right-clicking on the account name in the folder pane, selecting "Subscribe" and seeing if the folders appear in the list.

You could try more extraordinary measures to recover lost messages. That would entail using your computer's drive as little as possible until the attempted recovery, licensing data recovery software, and applying some technical knowledge. I do not know how effective such measures would be.