How to Restore an Email After Formatting Thunderbird

Your email in Thunderbird may have disappeared during formatting, but it is not gone.

Your email may have disappeared if you recently formatted or reformatted Thunderbird. The formatting process wipes the program clean, allowing users to start fresh. Luckily, the emails are not gone entirely. They are still stored on your computer, so you can restore one or all of them without too much difficulty. The trick is to set up an identical account to the one that you had before you formatted, which you probably would have wanted to do anyway.

Instructions

1. Start Thunderbird.

2. Choose "Create Mail Account" from the File menu.

3. Use the same email address and server settings that you had used to set up the account in Thunderbird previously.

4. Choose "Account Settings" from the Tools menu.

5. Click "Server Settings."

6. Select "Local Directory."

7. Locate your account directories in the window that opens. A Gmail user, for instance, would see "pop-gmail.com" and "pop-gmail-1.com." Other email services will have different words instead of "gmail."

8. Select the one without the "-1" and click "OK. "

9. Restart Thunderbird. This will restore all of your email. If you only want one or some of the messages, simply delete the rest.

References

• mozillaZine: Recovering Deleted Mail Accounts