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Old emails unacessible, help

  • 1 reply
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  • Last reply by Toad-Hall

Patrick
Patrick
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Hi, I worked at a company, had an email account and used Thunderbird - all the emails were stored in my profile (it's a large file size ). I no longer work for the company so my email credentials no longer work.

Currently whenever I start thunderbird I see my old email account there but it immediatly complains my login has failed and it just won't allow me to access the emails that are in my profile - i.e all the old emails. I just want to be able to access all the old emails, I fully understand I can't access the server but I don't need to I just want to read the emails that were already in my profile.

Is there anyway to do this?

Hi, I worked at a company, had an email account and used Thunderbird - all the emails were stored in my profile (it's a large file size ). I no longer work for the company so my email credentials no longer work. Currently whenever I start thunderbird I see my old email account there but it immediatly complains my login has failed and it just won't allow me to access the emails that are in my profile - i.e all the old emails. I just want to be able to access all the old emails, I fully understand I can't access the server but I don't need to I just want to read the emails that were already in my profile. Is there anyway to do this?

All Replies (1)

Toad-Hall
Toad-Hall
  • Top 25 Contributor
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Sounds like you are talking about an imap account. Imap accounts store emails on the server.

Imap accounts synchronise subscribed folders with server to show what is on server.

Imap accounts can be set to download headers or full copies of emails and this can also be done on a per folder basis.

If you only downloaded headers then when you click on email in Thread Pane, Thunderbird needs to connect to the server in order to download a copy of email into a temp folder on computer to facilate viewing.

If you downloaded full copies of emails then a copy would be saved within thunderbird and you should be able to view emails even when no access to internet.

So, if you knew you were about to stop accessing server for whatever reason, you would ensure Account Settings were set up to download full copies of emails in all folders, then go into offline mode to stop the folders from synchronising whilst you got copies of all emails into new folders in the 'Local Folders' mail account. Local Folders accounts do not synchronise with any server and those emails are stored in Thunderbird. Then you would be able to delete copies off the server and remove the account before it is deactivated off server.

So what do you have stored in Thunderbird?

When Thunderbird is set up to download full copies, emails are stored in mbox (no extension) text files within the imap account in your profile folder.

The default setting where thundrebird creates it's profile folder is:

Windows OS

  • C:\Users\<Windows user name>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\<Profile name>\ ImapMail\ imap * account name folder

If you see files with a msf extension then these are only index files. They do not contain emails and they are used by Thunderbird to know what email needs to be accessed on server and downloaded.

If you see folders with sbd extension, then this means you had subfolders, so these folders may also contain index files and mbox (no extension) files.

If you do not see any mbox files (no extension) that have same name as the folder you see in Folder Pane such as 'Inbox', then you have not had settings to download full copies of emails, so thunderbird does not contain any copies of emails.