Daniel wrote:
dirk wrote on 16/03/18 21:49:

can an accidentally deleted message be recovered?

It is no longer in the trash map.

Dirk, have you compacted your inbox file since you occidentally deleted your message??

Normally, when you delete an e-mail, it is not actually deleted, just a bit of coding at the start of the message is changed to indicate not to display that e-mail as being in the Inbox.

When you "Empty the Trash", I'm guessing that bit of coding is changed again to indicate not to show the e-mail in the Trash folder, either.

When you "File->Compact Folders" then the e-mail is totally history!!

If you haven't "File->Compact Folders" since deleting the e-mail, I think the e-mail would still be recoverable by closing SeaMonkey and opening the file called "inbox" without the suffix and without the "" in a text editor (maybe save it somewhere else, first!!) such as Notepad/Wordpad and searching for some distinctive text (do you remember the Subject:??) and editing that message to make it visible.

I don't know what you actually need to change or what you should change it to .... but, maybe, someone else will drop by with that information!


To add to what Daniel wrote IF you have not compacted folders there is a way to recover your messages. Also this only applies to POP mail which resides on your own computer.

SeaMonkey|Thunderbird uses mbox format for mail in which all the messages are in a single text file. When you move or delete a message the data is not really removed from the file but just a bitflag is set in the message header (again IF not compacted). Each message has a header and a line:

X-Mozilla-Status: 0001

The above means message has been viewed the next example below means it has been deleted.

X-Mozilla-Status: 0009

Reference for the flags is you are interested can be found here:

<https://dxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/mailnews/base/public/nsMsgMessageFlags.h>

So with a simple search and replace you can restore your messages. The mailbox file often is too big for many text editors. It can easily be done with a regular expression using sed or perl.

For example with sed to recover Inbox on for account smtp.example.com:

1) First close SeaMonkey

2) Move to the mail directory in profile smtp.example.com in a command|terminal window

3) Enter command:

sed -r "s/X-Mozilla-Status: 0[0-9a-f]{3}/X-Mozilla-Status: 0000/" Sent > Recovered

4) Start SeaMonkey Mail and in that account will be a new mail folder "Recovered" with all your Inbox messages set to pristine unread state.

In Windows you can install a port of sed, or use the regexp with some Windows app with such search and replace feature.

Note: I took the most conservative approach in not overwriting the original Inbox file. You can move mail by drag and drop to restore your messages or just delete Inbox file and rename Recovered file to Inbox.


--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com
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