Lost Emails In Mozilla Thunderbird

I was having trouble sending eMails so the support guy for my web hosting company told me to delete my account and recreate it. I asked if he was sure I wouldn't loose eMails and he assured me I wouldn't

Well he was wrong. What I need to know is that when I deleted the account if the date files for the account were deleted too. If the files are still there, how can I access them.

Any Thunderbird experts out there that can help me?

Tony

 

It depends whether you used POP3 or IMAP in your TB settings - if the emails are NOT still on the server of the email account, then you've lost them. You might be able to use free undelete software such as Recuva to recover them on your hard drive.
You need to use periodic back up software such as Mozbackup.

Also check the contents of your Thunderbird profile if still there:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data

 

I use POP and yes that's what I figured but I had to ask...

 

As you were using POP the emails have been downloaded to your computer and should still be there and deleting the account ought not to delete them. I have TBird installed here but in IMAP config. I'll need to do a little testing to find out where TBird stores its POP mail. Bit tied up right now but I will take a look as soon as I can.

 

Checking the contents of the profile is not going to help the OP as it will merely confirm or otherwise its existence. It is not possible to access messages or any other TBird data by looking at the contents of the profile.

@technojock - all you need do, assuming you haven't removed anything other than the mail account itself, is to recreate it. You will need to be accurate as to the account details and the password. It's possible TBird still holds the password if you aren't sure of it - Tools > Options > Security > Saved Passwords. Good luck with it.

 

I've looked over the replies and I've found that I still only have one profile but I think I've found the messages but I don't know how to open them. I have 2 eMail accounts showing. One is bizmail.yahoo.com and the newer one is bismail.yaboo.com-1. I'm going to back up the profile before I do anything. What I'm thinking is, if I move all the file to the -1 folder would I have access to all my old eMails...

 

Moving just one is sufficient to test your theory.

 

As you yourself can now see, checking the Profile Folder contents was always the correct advice whatever else was suggested.
TB will automatically pick up the profile folder and its contents that you have.
If on the advice of your ISP you deleted one account within TB, it will now not include any data for that when it picks up the profile.
It's as simple as that.
If you needed to recreate an email account in TB, once done it will pick that up.
For any data deleted during the account removal if it is needed then using Recuva may recover it from the system hard drive.
To recover an existing profile file, you can follow Mozilla Support guides to renaming a file and placing it inside the current profile folder.

 

This is exactly the message I was trying to convey before part of this thread was deleted by admins. I have now had a chance to test this and it has worked - all old messages were recovered when the account was recreated. However it is essential that the account email address and password are exactly the same as they were in the deleted account. You appear to have created a new account with a similar but not identical name but that will not do at all. The account name must be identical. In recreating the account I did not have to provide server details as Thunderbird did that for me.

Don't waste time trying to move messages from one account in the profile to another, just recreate the original account as I have been advising all along.

 

I'm not sure why the Yahoo small business tech support guy felt it necessary to delete the account. At fist it sounded like he knew what he was doing with Thunderbird... Anyway we weren't changing anything but the account security since they feel the need to change it from time to time without telling me and I don't know until I can't either download or upload eMail. This time the problem was a failure to upload. I suppose I should have been more suspicious about his abilities... Anyway I was correct and Thunderbird created a new eMail folder without deleting the old one. I was able to restore all my eMails a few minutes ago. I've tested download and it's working but I haven't tested upload. I've verified all my server settings and updated them as needed.

I used to do consulting all the time and this type of problem used to be a breeze. However I gave it up about 5 years ago and I didn't know how far I was out of practice until now...

Tony