I was trying to get Thunderbird to access my Hotmail account through IMAP instead of POP, so I moved all my messages from the account to "Local Folders", then I removed the POP account and created the new IMAP one. After that I started to move messages into the IMAP account, but I ran into some trouble when the server wouldn't want to accept all the messages I was uploading and it would stop. So, I decided to move everything from "Local Folders" into the IMAP account while Thunderbird was offline, once it finished, I went online and instead of uploading the newly found messages in my IMAP account to the server, it decided to delete the messages. I guess because the actual online account contained no files so it wanted to synchronise and make my offline folder to also contain no files. In short, never try this. It's a disaster. And, I know I should've made a back up prior to trying this, it's just that Thunderbird is usually very reliable, it never occurred to me. I still have the MBOX and MSF files, but even though they contain information, no extension can extract it. Could anyone, please, help me out?