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Thunderbird: Lost archived mails when deleting account

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sbruyns
sbruyns
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Hi Thunderbird experts,

It seems I navigated myself into a quite peculiar situation. My main mail accounted was recently closed, thus I archived all of my mails. Afterwards I deleted the account in Thunderbird, not knowing (and not warned, it was so fast to do this...) that it would also remove access to my archived mails. Now the course of action would apparently be to remake the account (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Recovering_deleted_mail_accounts), which I can't, because the account doesn't exist anymore. The mails do still exist, I can see them in a profile in my thunderbird folder (.thunderbird/kgdx28ct.default-release/ImapMail), but I can't easily access them anymore. Is there a way to load these archived folders into Thunderbird again? I tried everything that I could come up with without success.

Thanks a lot for your help, Sebastian

Hi Thunderbird experts, It seems I navigated myself into a quite peculiar situation. My main mail accounted was recently closed, thus I archived all of my mails. Afterwards I deleted the account in Thunderbird, not knowing (and not warned, it was so fast to do this...) that it would also remove access to my archived mails. Now the course of action would apparently be to remake the account (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Recovering_deleted_mail_accounts), which I can't, because the account doesn't exist anymore. The mails do still exist, I can see them in a profile in my thunderbird folder (.thunderbird/kgdx28ct.default-release/ImapMail), but I can't easily access them anymore. Is there a way to load these archived folders into Thunderbird again? I tried everything that I could come up with without success. Thanks a lot for your help, Sebastian

All Replies (2)

Stans
Stans
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You can recreate the account in Thunderbird even if the account doesn't exist outside of Thunderbird. You can even do it while Thunderbird is offline. Start by taking Thunderbird offline as follows:

File > Offline > Work Offline > Later

Start the process to recreate the account, but supply the Name and email address only. Leave the password blank, click the Manual config button then click the Advanced config. This will create the account and take you to its account settings dialog. Click the Server Settings option on the left pane then in the main pane, in the section called "Message Storage" there's a field for Local directory. Use the Browse button to locate the folder that was used originally by that account. Restart Thunderbird and the old account will be back with the emails it contained.

Novain'i Stans t@

Toad-Hall
Toad-Hall
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If you remove an account from Thunderbird then you remove an account, so not seeing anything when you have removed it would be expected.

If you can get the imap account back as per Stans instructions, do not go back into online mode, stay in offline mode. Create suitable folders in 'Local folders' mail account and get 'copies' of emails put into those 'Local folder ' folders.


Alternative : Assuming you have fully downloaded emails in mbox files that are still in the profile name imap account folder, you could copy them into 'Local Folders'.

Exit Thunderbird.

Access profile name folder, (.thunderbird/kgdx28ct.default-release) you will see a 'Mail' folder, it contains the 'Local Folders' folder, you will also see 'ImapMail' folder that contains the imap mail accounts.

click on 'ImapMail' folder

mbox files do not have any extension and contain emails. If you had subflders then you will see *.sbd folders and they would contain the subfolders, so these folders may contain mbox files as well. If you only see .msf index files then you do not have full copies of emails.

You could copy the mbox files and then paste them into 'Local Folders' mail account (as mentioned it is in 'Mail' folder)

See example in image below. I would advise copy rather than move because if it fails you can repeat the action. Once all mbox files are in 'Local Folders' mail account you can restart Thunderbird.