Thunderbird: Recover deleted emails - Here's how
Mails are deleted quickly, unfortunately sometimes a bit too quickly. This practical tip shows you how to restore deleted emails in Thunderbird.
Retrieve deleted emails with additional tools in Thunderbird
The easiest way to restore deleted emails with suitable tools. The prerequisite for this is to regularly backup your Thunderbird accounts and data.
- A reliable backup tool is MozBackup. Restoring your deleted emails is also done quickly with the helper. It is particularly practical that you can use the tool not only to back up your Thunderbird files, but also for Firefox backups.
- The free add-on "Recover Deleted Messages" also offers you a convenient way to get back your deleted data.
- After you have integrated the add-on into Thunderbird, you can quickly restore the deleted mails with a casual right-click on the corresponding folder. The recovered mails can then be found in a newly created folder.
- Important: The tool can only restore the deleted mails if you have not compressed the folders in the meantime. The same applies to the recovery method presented below.
Recover deleted emails in Thunderbird
The last variant of mail recovery presented is the most tedious, but you do not need an additional program for this. Thunderbird keeps your mails or the corresponding path of all mails in mailbox files until you compress the folders. Only then will the emails be permanently deleted from your hard drive.
- To quickly find the corresponding directory of the mailbox files in Windows Explorer, open the "Help" option in Thunderbird under the "Application menu" button. In the context menu you choose "Troubleshooting Information".
- In the "General information" area, click the "Show folder" button, which you will find next to "Profile folder". The path for the two folders ImapMail and Mail is then displayed in Explorer. In these two folders are the individual folders for your email accounts created in Thunderbird.
- Open the folder of the corresponding email account, you will also find the associated mailbox files. There are two files for each folder in a mail account: a mailbox file and the associated index file, which you can recognize by the MSF extension.
- After opening the corresponding mailbox file with a text editor, you will see a list of the corresponding mails. You can easily recognize the emails already deleted from Thunderbird by the number combination behind the Mozilla status. The deleted mails have the number sequence 0009.
- To restore the emails, change the number sequence from 0009 to the number combination 0001 - for read emails. Finally, save the mailbox file again - without the extension of the name - and delete the associated index file.
If you have problems deleting folders in Thunderbird, we will show you in our next practical tip how to delete folders in Thunderbird.