I’ve had a catastrophic loss of emails. I moved a load of messages from my hotmail inbox (within Thunderbird) to a local folder, in order to back them up 😡

Anyway, now they’re gone from the inbox, but lost or corrupted in the folder I sent them too. Annoyingly, I can see that there is 186 messages listed in that folder, it’s just that everything else is blank.

Tearing my hair out here. They were obviously important messages or I wouldn’t have bothered trying to back them up. Wish I’d never bothered now.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Have you checked via the web login whether they’re sitting in the deleted items folder?

I don’t use it in windows, but can you locate the emails in the file manager, copy them to, say, your desktop, and then use Thunderbird’s import function? I’d be surprised if they were lost altogether.

Have you checked via the web login whether they’re sitting in the deleted items folder?

Tried that, to no avail.

According to the wiki, the mail lives in

C:\Users\<Windows user name>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\<Profile name>\

You have to ‘show hidden files’ to access it.
“Organize ? Folder and Search Options ? Folder Options ? View (tab) ? Show hidden files and folders” in Explorer.

Should be somewhere in the Mail folder.

Edit- the files you’re looking for will be in a folder with some .msf files. The .msf file is just a database, the ones you want will have no extension and you can open them in a text editor and see the emails in ‘raw’ format.

Thanks Bob,

Unfortunately, it’s not like my emails are just stored in that location. There’s just files with weird extensions. Presumably my emails are those files but I’ve no idea what to do with them.

edit; just seen your last bit. Yes, that’s right, great thanks! I’ll try and open them with notepad or something.

Hmm, doesn’t look good. There’s supposed to be 186 emails in that ‘file’, but the size is only 36K. Whereas another folder with 31 messages in is 12000K

Strangely, the inbox ‘file’ (where I moved them from) is 40000K, but there’s nothing in my inbox in the real world because I moved them or deleted them. It could just be all the stuff I’ve deleted, or maybe it’s the missing emails. Either way, I don’t know how to retrieve it.

Thanks for your help.

If you’ve found the inbox file, right-click / Previous Versions might help?

I’d suggest taking a copy of your mail folder before doing anything else too, in case you make it worse.

Thanks.

I think I may have to engage in some heavy drinking.

This was all the important stuff: tax, receipts, insurance etc. That’ll teach me to try and get organised.

AAAAARGH!

If you’ve found the inbox file, right-click / Previous Versions might help?

I’d suggest taking a copy of your mail folder before doing anything else too, in case you make it worse.

Do you know, you just might have saved my bacon there. I’d never even heard of the feature. I tried it and it looks like there’s a restore point last week, before I messed around with it. So if I swap the two files I should be back where I started.

You’ve saved the day, thanks so much! I was about to start breaking things/drinking heavily. Now I can go out for a bike ride/drink heavily.

A virtual pint to you good sir!

We use it at work and I use it for my personal emails at home. Once you’ve got your emails back, just copy a few at a time into your local folder. I find that if you try and drag too many at once it causes the problem you’ve just had.