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Switched Imap servers, thunderbird deleted my inbox in doing so - can I recover these emails?

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  • Last reply by christ1

caflex
caflex
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We switched hosting providers and it also changed our IMAP servers. I updated my account to reflect the new IMAP information and it took away my whole inbox. Out of curiosity I searched for my old emails and they come up in the search function but when I click on the message it's blank, yet the search function still shows a brief message summary.

I then went to the %APPDATA% folder and found I still had the old profile mail box in there C:\Users\myname\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\thunderbirdprofilename\ImapMail\oldimapserver

and the inbox, inbox.msf still show large file sizes so it looks like its compressed. Can I recover these even by adding the inbox with the older server settings back, although I wont be able to login and then save remotely? or a way to uncompress these boxes and import?

We switched hosting providers and it also changed our IMAP servers. I updated my account to reflect the new IMAP information and it took away my whole inbox. Out of curiosity I searched for my old emails and they come up in the search function but when I click on the message it's blank, yet the search function still shows a brief message summary. I then went to the %APPDATA% folder and found I still had the old profile mail box in there C:\Users\myname\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\thunderbirdprofilename\ImapMail\oldimapserver and the inbox, inbox.msf still show large file sizes so it looks like its compressed. Can I recover these even by adding the inbox with the older server settings back, although I wont be able to login and then save remotely? or a way to uncompress these boxes and import?

Chosen solution

I updated my account to reflect the new IMAP information and it took away my whole inbox.

That is the expected behavior with IMAP. What you see in Thunderbird is a mirror of your messages on the server.

What you should have done prior to start messing with it:

  • copy your message from the server to your 'Local Folders' account
  • create the new account, not messing with the existing one
  • copy the messages back to the new server

If you have a backup of your downloaded messages from the old account you can restore them to your 'Local Folders' account. Mail files are the ones without a file extension, e.g. like Inbox. Mail files are plain text, and they are not compressed. Note, with an IMAP account for messages to be downloaded to your disk, you must have had synchronization enabled for your old account. Otherwise all you have are the message headers.

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All Replies (3)

christ1
christ1
  • Top 25 Contributor
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Chosen Solution

I updated my account to reflect the new IMAP information and it took away my whole inbox.

That is the expected behavior with IMAP. What you see in Thunderbird is a mirror of your messages on the server.

What you should have done prior to start messing with it:

  • copy your message from the server to your 'Local Folders' account
  • create the new account, not messing with the existing one
  • copy the messages back to the new server

If you have a backup of your downloaded messages from the old account you can restore them to your 'Local Folders' account. Mail files are the ones without a file extension, e.g. like Inbox. Mail files are plain text, and they are not compressed. Note, with an IMAP account for messages to be downloaded to your disk, you must have had synchronization enabled for your old account. Otherwise all you have are the message headers.

caflex
caflex Question owner
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Thank you so much! I found the Inbox file and moved it to the local mail folder and it had all my mails that were downloaded to the PC. It looks like the setting was on to save locally automatically.

You are a life savor!

christ1
christ1
  • Top 25 Contributor
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Good. When your problem has been fixed can you mark the thread as 'Solved' please? Thank you.