E-mail help

[SGirl]

Oops. I've just lost 24 hours' worth of e-mail - I'm using Netscape 4.7 and ran an Empty Trashcan this afternoon, and for some reason the day's mail ended up in there prior to the delete....

Does anyone know whether there's any way of restoring the messages?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

[Bodo]

Evening Sian.
It's a bit of a nerd job, but you can do it too.
I've picked this one up from a troubleshooting FAQ:

said:

I accidentally deleted my email messages but I have not yet compacted the folders. Is there a way I can recover my messages? Yes, there is, but it may be somewhat time-consuming depending on the number of messages you deleted: Before compacting the mail folders, Mozilla flags all e-mails which are to be deleted for deletion. This is being done by changing the "X-Mozilla-Status:" that you can find when you open your Inbox file¹ with an ascii editor². This is done for each e-mail seperately! So when the X-Mozilla-Status of a non-deleted e-mail looks like: "X-Mozilla-Status: 9001", the deleted status is "X-Mozilla-Status: 9009". Apparently Mozilla/Netscape adds a hexadecimal 8 to the status number or changes the last digit to 8 or 9. Going through my inbox file, I noticed that all e-mails where I changed the last digit back to 1 were resurrected. Prerequisite is that you have deleted the .msf or .nsf files and you have not compacted your mail folders before running Mozilla/Netscape.

http://mozilla.gunnars.net/mozfaq_use.html#recover_deleted_mail

¹ the location of that file depends on your operating system
² on Windows, an ASCII editor is notepad.exe from the Accessories menu