Comments on: Recover deleted or corrupted Thunderbird messages

By: PaulR

PaulR — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:10:44 +0000

Thanks, top tip! Thought I’d lost everything and now I’m getting it back as I edit each file. Top banana..

By: Thunderbird foul-up. - www.Head-Case.org

Thunderbird foul-up. - www.Head-Case.org — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:17:27 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:22:35 +0000

Excellent tip nearly paid $20 for a program that does what you describe
Thanks

By: website design New York City

website design New York City — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:29:49 +0000

thank you! That looks like a great resource

By: Max

Max — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:34:30 +0000

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

By: Nicolas

Nicolas — Sat, 09 May 2009 13:38:24 +0000

Thank you so much!

By: melanie

melanie — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:54:03 +0000

It never worked for me and have been losing mails mysteriously. I have infact lost more than 6ooo mails

By: Shashikant Gaikwad

Shashikant Gaikwad — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:20:39 +0000

Thanks for knowing me about removing deleted mark into the mbox file of thunderbird. It helped me a lot.

By: Brian

Brian — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 04:04:18 +0000

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

By: Foreigner

Foreigner — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 06:26:30 +0000

The technique works only if you have not done a “Compact” operation on the mail folder.

By: Katie

Katie — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:14:07 +0000

THANYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU – set text editor to replace all x-delivery-status: 0008 with x-delivery-status: 0000 and it worked!!!!

By: b

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 05:07:55 +0000

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! :)

By: doug

doug — Sun, 06 May 2007 18:38:47 +0000

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….

By: Doktor Meth. E. Drines Blog

Doktor Meth. E. Drines Blog — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 01:32:05 +0000

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…

By: Steve Weller

Steve Weller — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 12:37:13 +0000

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.