Unintentionally Deleted Emails. [Linux.]

[qualtrough]

A few days ago I did something exceedingly stupid. Thinking I was clearing space on my ISP disk I instead set my computer's server settings to remove anything older than 10 days. I now have nothing old then 10 days, and some 10 years have disappeared. Many of these were compacted in folders by year.

I am running Mint.

Irretrievably lost, or is there some way to undo that?

[DanRaisch]

How is the account set up in Thunderbird, as POP or IMAP? Find out using menu path Edit->Account Settings->Server Settings->Server Type at the top right of the dialogue.

[qualtrough]

Hi Dan,

Thank you for trying to help me.

Set up as POP.

[DanRaisch]

Then you can try this on the local computer -- Try to manually recover the message:

* - Turn off Thunderbird and do not compact
* - Locate the file containing the message (same name as the folder in Thunderbird, no extension) in your profile
* - Delete the file with the same name and the extension .msf
* - Open the file without extension with Notepad (or another text editor)
* - Locate the messages that were unintentionally deleted
* - Change the status (X-Mozilla-Status) to all zero
* - Save that file
* - Restart Thunderbird

If no luck with that, you could also contact your email provider to ask if they can restore your account to its status the day before that "accident". That would probably result in Thunderbird downloading the messages from the server as if they were new.