I have come across several articles on how I can recover deleted emails however none of them seem to work seeing that the INBOX file does not appear to be that large and none of the emails are in the INBOX file i.e. none even those I have not deleted. I am using IMAP to access my emails and am in an urgent need to retrieve the emails I had deleted.
The sites I refered to regarding retrieving deleted emails are http://www.z-a-recovery.com/thunderbird-email-database.htm and http://jivebay.com/2007/02/09/restore-deleted-email-in-thunderbird/.
Please help!
cheers
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Can someone please help?
As a general rule, when you delete something, it will not be easy to get back.
There are a few things that can be tried that may work, by catching it effectively before the delete has finished.
One of these places is that the "flagged for deletion" email is still in the INBOX file until that file is compacted. You say they are not in that file, which means that they are gone from there.
Another place to look would be the Trash folder on the server, but that only applies if your client is configured to move message to trash on delete.
If they are not in these places, then the only possible chance that you would have would be to use a disk sector viewer to manually search through every single sector of the free space on your drive to see if it contained a fragment of text from the old email, but even this is unlikely to succeed, since the text itself was probably overwritten when the inbox was compacted.
In other words, unless you have a backup, they're probably gone forever. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
>I am using IMAP to access my emails and am in an urgent need to retrieve the emails I had deleted.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland