Thunderbird 1.06 local folder problem

Just got a call today from an office I'm doing the computers for at the moment. I've taken a look at it and can't see any way to fix it, nor can I see why it hapened which is probably more important.

They have created a folder in the local folders section called "personal folders". This folder has sub-folders for each member of staff, to which they saved a number of emails.

Someone renamed "personal folders" to "personal saved email", and on doing so, all the saved emails from each of the subfolders dissapeared.

My first thought was to change the name back and see if that solved it (well, it was a 50/50 guess), but nobody can remember what it was called before! There is no backup of the email store.

In trying to retrieve the email, I've gone through all the likely places in explorer (application data, recyle bin, temp, etc) and there's no sign of it. I've also scanned drive with active@undelete and theres no sign of anything to recover from this incident. I then tried system restre. I didn't think it would work, and it didn't.

Firstly, soes anybody have any ideas on a way to recover the lost email, and secondly (and more importantly), does anybody have any idea why this happened?

What do you mean when you say that they've saved Emails there ? Are you talking about Emails saved in EML format in that folder or do you mean that folder was used to store the Thunderbird files (Inbox, Sent, etc.) ?

When I say saved, I mean that they've dragged emails out of the AOL IMAP inbox and dropped them into the appropriate subfolder of the renamed folder, which is listed under "local folders" in Thunderbird. In doing so, they've copied the emails from the server to the Thunderbird local folders database.

I have to say though, that retrieving the stored email is no longer an issue, but it would still be usefull to know what happened and why.

Reading through Bugzilla, I see that there are a number of flaws related to the local folders that result in data loss. I didn't see anything that describes this situation, but there could be related issues perhaps. Or it could have been user error - I just can't say for sure. I can only take their word for it as there's nothing to indicate otherwise.