Hi,
The first thing to check is if you can find your ThunderBird mail files and see how big they are. This will tell you if you need to try and repair your existing files, or whether you need to search your drive for deleted data (If the mail files are still a reasonable size, then they most likely still contain the data. If they are only small, then you need to search the entire hard disk for deleted email).
Thunderbird's mail files are in the standard plain text "mbox" format.
Your mail files are inside your profile. Each mail folder (Inbox, Sent, etc.) is stored as two files — one with no extension (e.g. INBOX), which is the mail file itself (in "mbox" format), and one with an .msf extension (e.g. INBOX.msf), which is the index (Mail Summary File) to the mail file.
To Locate your profile folder
- On Windows Vista/XP/2000, the path is usually %AppData%\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\, where xxxxxxxx is a random string of 8 characters. Just browse to C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\ on Windows XP/2000 or C:\users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\ on Windows Vista, and the rest should be obvious.
- On Windows 95/98/Me, the path is usually C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default \