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Lost emails following system refresh

Hi All

I recently had an issue with my system (HP Envy H8 running Windows 8.1) not booting up or recognising the hard drive and had to call out a technician who managed to get Windows to recognise the hard drive. However, this did mean having to run a system refresh which, according to the on screen instructions, should leave your data intact but may remove some programmes.

Basically this was like starting Windows from scratch, so I had to set up Windows Live Mail with my e-mail server details, etc. It also means that Live Mail started up with empty mail folders (inbox, sent, etc.) on both my email accounts.

Most of the other applications were unaffected by the system refresh and all my office documents, music, etc. are still there.

Live Mail is sending and receiving messages but, I can't seem to find any of my emails from before the crash. They were set up on POP3, and I know that they were on the hard drive (having previously imported live mail .eml files into Mozilla Thunderbird).

So, my question is - where have my emails gone?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Terry

Kimputer

Live Mail proobably kept it in a place that the System Refresh procedure did NOT mark as "DO NOT TOUCH" like the My Documents folders etc are.
It was probably in the Roaming folder, or some Appdata subfolder. You can try to scan your disk with Recuva to see if you can recover anything. If you see items with the original location as something like %UserProfile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail, these should be the files you're looking for. Getting them back is another thing though, it will probably involve in loading it with the original file name, then using newly created temp folders to store the messages, and the copying them back to merge with your new emails.

rindi

Since you have imported the emails into thunderbird, why don't you just use that mail client for your mails? It is the best mail client around after all!

Terrygordon

ASKER

Agree - but the refresh did the same to my thunderbird emails. :-)

Regards

Terry

rindi

Maybe thunderbird just started an empty profile. Chek in the location where your thunderbird profile is and check whether there is more than one. If I'm not mistaken, thunderbird profiles are usually stored in UserProfile\AppData\Local\Thunderbird

Terrygordon

ASKER

I've done a search on my hard drive and have found lots of folders with the extension .msf that match the mail folder names I had on thunderbird. These are stored on Windows.old\users\terry\appdata\roaming\Thunderbird\profiles, etc. Looking at the dates I assume they are the Thunderbird storage folders from before the crash.

So, if that is the case - How do I import them into Live Mail or even the new Thunderbird system?

Regards

Terry

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Kimputer

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rindi

If you have already downloaded mails into your new thunderbird setup, use the tool mentioned above. If not, you can just copy the complete folder into your new profile (with thunderbird closed while you copy).

Further I'd suggest you either setup your thunderbird account to leave the messages on the mail server, or better, if your mail provider supports the IMAP protocol, use that, it is much better than pop, and the mails stay on the server. That way you can access your mails from other devices.

Terrygordon

ASKER

Took a bit of playing around to figure out what to import - i.e. the mail folder names with no extensions, rather than the msf files, but it did the trick.