Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

How do I restore emails from Thunderbird to Hotmail inbox?

more options

I had my personal Hotmail account set up on my work Thunderbird using the POP protocol. Unfortunately this seems to automatically delete emails from my Hotmail inbox after a short time. Around 5,000 out of about 16,000 do seem to still be there in Hotmail in the subfolder 'POP' under 'Deleted'. The thing is I'm about to leave my current job and so the Thunderbird account will be shut down. What I'd love to do is to reinstate all the 16,000 or so emails from Thunderbird back to my Hotmail inbox. Any ideas would be massively appreciated! Many thanks, Henry

I had my personal Hotmail account set up on my work Thunderbird using the POP protocol. Unfortunately this seems to automatically delete emails from my Hotmail inbox after a short time. Around 5,000 out of about 16,000 do seem to still be there in Hotmail in the subfolder 'POP' under 'Deleted'. The thing is I'm about to leave my current job and so the Thunderbird account will be shut down. What I'd love to do is to reinstate all the 16,000 or so emails from Thunderbird back to my Hotmail inbox. Any ideas would be massively appreciated! Many thanks, Henry

All Replies (3)

more options

No idea what you are talking about. There is no such thing as a Thunderbird account. If you are using POP then the messages are on the local drive of your computer. Is that a work computer that you will no longer have access to? If you make a copy of your Thunderbird profile then you will have all messages, address book and account setting to take with you. This link tells you how to work with your profile.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-tb

more options

Thanks for that. Yes, I won't have access to the computer. Does that mean that I can make a copy of my profile which will keep all the contact info and messages apart from the POP ones stored on the servers at work? If so that would be useful but doesn't help with the old personal Hotmail emails. The IT guys at work have very kindly offered to put them on a hard drive for me. Would there then be any way I could get them off the hard drive and back into my Hotmail inbox?

more options

I have no idea how any "local to your company" address books work. I do know that any address books in Thunderbird are in your profile.

I do not use Hotmail so I cannot advise you how to use that.