It sometimes happens that I delete a mail by accident because it does look like spam or a message that I do not longer need. Thunderbird does not display that message anymore if it is completely deleted from the mail client. Unknown to many Thunderbird does not delete the messages but flags them only which means it is relatively easy to recover corrupted or deleted mails. This method only works if you have not compressed the mail folders because compressing removes deleted messages from the mail files.
Open the Thunderbird Application Data folder which is located in your document and settings folder in Windows. Select the appropriate Thunderbird profile if there is more than one and click on Mail in that profile. You get a listing of all your email addresses. If you setup Firefox to have different mail folders for every email address you have to click in the folder of the email address that received (or send) the message. Otherwise Local Folders is the way to go.
The important files are those without extensions (Trash, Sent, Inbox ..) – locate the one that contained the mail(s) that you have deleted or are corrupted (do not show up anymore). Open it in an text editor, you could use notepad2 for instance for this purpose. Some folders might be rather big so choose a text editor that can handle large files. Thunderbird should be closed completely while editing those files.
All mails are basically stored in that file. The important part for us are the lines X-Mozilla-Status which defines a certain state of a message such as Read, Unread or Deleted. Search for the message(s) that you want to recover and edit the X-Mozilla-Status: XXXX line into X-Mozilla-Status: 0000 for unread or X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 for read messages.
Recovered messages will appear at the bottom of the folder and should be there after you startup Thunderbird for the next time. You sometimes have to delete the .msf file to make this work. If you edited the file Trash you would delete the file Trash.msf afterwards if the mails do not re-appear after a new start of Thunderbird.
source (and additional information)
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15 Responses to “Recover deleted or corrupted Thunderbird messages”
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Recovering deleted mails in Thunderbird
Right. We all know Thunderbird is an “intelligent” piece of software. It knows that physically deleting e-mails is expensive, so it just sets flags. Now that knowledge helped me two days ago when I accidently deleted all my e-mails before I could bac…
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[...] Thunderbird messages with the a similar approach recommended here, maybe duplicate your folders and give it a try. It may be worth posting your query to Thunderbird [...]
Worked a treat for me. Actually, it worked even better than I’d hoped: migrating email from Thunderbird to GroupWise, I managed to lose about 18 months worth of email from one of my most critical folders. Or so I thought. Your suggestion allowed me to recover all my previously “lost” email by simply editing a single X-Mozilla-Status line. Not sure why this worked, and I don’t particularly care, ’cause I got my email back. Three cheers.
thank you so much for this article. I deleted when I shouldn’t have and now I have recovered them. Thank you, thank you, thank you….
Thank you! this worked really well. I have a 100+MB mail file .. all mail was deleted. There were heaps of different mail status flags being used and 851 emails so I wasn’t going to do it by hand. So I opened it in Textpad (from textpad.com) pressed F8 and used the following find query: “X-Mozilla-Status: [a-z0-9]\{4\}” (no quotes).. replaced with “X-Mozilla-Status: 0001″, clicked replace all and it is done! :)
THANYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU – set text editor to replace all x-delivery-status: 0008 with x-delivery-status: 0000 and it worked!!!!
The technique works only if you have not done a “Compact” operation on the mail folder.
My PC crashed but I had a back-up of the email folder but not my profile. I rebuilt the PC and restored my email folders. Everytime I went into one of my keepers folders, it deleted my emails. Since I didn’t backup my profile, I had to reset the ‘recover disk space’ to not delete emails (every folder and the server in the accounts setup), modify every X-Mozilla-Status to 0001. You can only do this if you still have your .msf file
Thanks for knowing me about removing deleted mark into the mbox file of thunderbird. It helped me a lot.
It never worked for me and have been losing mails mysteriously. I have infact lost more than 6ooo mails
Thank you so much!
This has been a veryyyy useful post. It really works. I had about 1200 emails in my inbox and samn they were not opening. Even though the folder used to show up in thunderbird, but when I used to click on the inbox folder I was not able to see my previous emails !!!! I tried everything nothing work. Thanx a million for above posts. Just downloaded textpad, opened the inbox file (it does not have any extension, so choose open all files option in textpad). It took a while for textpad to open since mine was 800MB file. Pressed F8 search for X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 and replaced with X-Mozilla-Status: 0000
thank you! That looks like a great resource
Excellent tip nearly paid $20 for a program that does what you describe
Thanks
Thanks, top tip! Thought I’d lost everything and now I’m getting it back as I edit each file. Top banana..