If you delete your entire Thunderbird profile (or a specific Local Folder that’s not empty), then any emails in the Deleted Items or Inbox subdirectories will be deleted permanently unless you first recover them! However, if there are any excess files in the Local Directory folder such as attachments from emails received – which take up lots of space but don’t actually appear when attached to emails – then they can be safely deleted. What happens if I delete my Local Directory or entire profile? However, if you need to recover deleted emails or an attachment then they can still be recovered with the steps below. Nothing! The files and attachments are still there until you empty your Trash or permanently delete them, but they’ll just not be visible to Thunderbird anymore – which means that any new emails added by the provider aren’t displayed until you reconnect again (which is the same as it would be if your internet connection was down temporarily).
#OMNIPLAN DALLAS PASSWORD#
Once emails are downloaded then they’re encrypted using AES-256 (CRYPT_RSA_AES_256), so even if somebody intercepted your email messages in transit, they wouldn’t be able to read them without the correct password first! What happens if I delete my Local Folders folder? It also creates an md5 hash of the password before storing it locally – see here for more details on how it does this. If it wasn’t there then attachments would only be stored locally when Thunderbird had finished checking for new ones – which could take hours or even days as attachments are checked individually rather than in bulk like mail messages! Are my emails secure?ĭefinitely – Thunderbird stores everything inside a special folder called Local Folders, Mail & News Accounts (or IMAP account if an IMAP account is being used) that only you can access.
#OMNIPLAN DALLAS OFFLINE#
The Attachment Cache file is designed to do all the work for you by doing hourly backups while you’re offline and storing them safely on your hard drive until they’re needed. While some people enjoy manually backing up their data, most of us don’t (especially if we’re dealing with gigabytes worth of emails!). Probably not – this isn’t really the point of this feature. Should I manually back up my emails from Local Folders?
This has now been discontinued due to security concerns and as such is no longer available in current releases. Note: If you have been using older versions of Thunderbird for some time then it may not use this method – instead attachments would be stored locally on an individual basis when needed. This means that even if your hard drive fails or there’s a power cut, any attachments added in the last hour will be stored locally until the next hourly check so they won’t be lost! By default, Thunderbird checks for new attachments every hour and automatically stores them to your local folder (but only if you’re offline).
In addition to using a special folder, Thunderbird also uses what’s called an Attachment Cache file (.msf) which holds attachments connected to your emails. See here for more info on viewing/organising all folders under an IMAP account. *Although technically all emails are stored within this directory structure (including drafts and sent messages etc), they aren’t displayed by default so it’s unlikely that you’ll see anything other than your inbox at first glance. However, if you want to back up or recover emails here then you should be able to find them in either the Inbox or Deleted Items subdirectories respectively. Some email providers create subdirectories within the Inbox directory depending on how many messages there are, while others don’t so it won’t be as clear cut as the Local Folders account. The Account Settings folder – this is used only for POP and IMAP accounts and contains all the mails of the inbox in your Inbox directory*. This is where you’d look to recover/backup all emails across an account if you lost them for some reason (you’ve had a power cut, hard drive went bad etc). All emails from all folders from that account are stored here in.
The Local Folders folder – this is the default storage location for most email accounts. So where exactly does Thunderbird store my emails? There are two places Thunderbird stores your emails:ġ.
You can also find them via Tools | Account Settings | Storage Folder Location. By default, these special folders are located under ‘C:\Documents and Settings\User Name’ (XP) or ‘C:\Users\User Name’ (Windows Vista).
#OMNIPLAN DALLAS WINDOWS#
All emails are stored here as plain text files – there’s no database file involved! Another way to think about this is that it works just like Windows Explorer or ‘My Computer’. This is called one of the special storage folders: Local Folders, Mail & News Accounts or if you have set up an IMAP account then that folder will be used instead. Thunderbird stores all your mail in a single folder on your hard drive.