Lil Sparrow wrote:
Jonathan N. Little wrote:

Firstly you have never said if this was POP3 or IMAP mail. This is
very significant because it determines *where* the email is actually
stored.

If is was POP3 then the actually messages would be located on your
hard drive in subdirectories under Mail within your profile directory:

Enter "about:support" in the browser url bar

Under "Application Basics" find "Profile Folder" and click "Open
Folder" button.

There should be a "Mail" subdirectory. If you are restoring your
backup to the correct location all your POP3 accounts would be there
with names like mail.example.com or pop.example.com

I use POP3. I was told a long time ago that using IMAP removes all the mails from the server once they are download to an email client.

Okay as Keith says it is actually the opposite with default settings.


There's nothing in the Mail subdirectory except what is already on the machine. I can't get any email to download except what was download after installing SeaMonkey initially.

Okay here is how you can fix this. I have moved profiles from system to system, OS to OS and fixed corrupted profiles many, many times.


Thank you for your help. I'll see if I can get my old machine stabilised and use that instead of the new machine.

So you have mail saved on an old computer, great! Since it is POP it will be on the hard drive of that computer. You can actually move that mail and add it to your new computer that is missing all your previous mail, but you have to do some things first so as not to *overwrite* one or the other.

1) Yes the locations where the mail resides is hidden area but here are ways around that. Follow my steps *exactly* and I will guarantee you can get your old mail back.

2) On *new* computer: Start SeaMonkey and enter "about:support" in URL bar.

3) At "Profile Folder" click "Open Folder", this will open Explorer in that hidden area.

4) Close SeaMonkey and back in Explorer move into parent "Profile" and you should see your current profile named "something.default" where "something" is a random 8-character string. Make a copy of this folder for backup, CYA.

5) On *old* computer open if SeaMonkey runs do the same thing as steps 1-3. If SeaMonkey does not run then assuming the profile is in the default location: WinKey+R to open Run box and enter, (you can cut and paste it):

%APPDATA%\Mozilla\SeaMonkey\Profiles

Explorer will open to that hidden area area and you should see another profile folder "something.default" move into that folder

6) Find the "Mail" subfolder and your mail folder should be something like mail.yourisp.com, pop.yourisp.com or incoming.yourisp.com and move into that folder.

7) In the mail profile folder your you should see files with no file extensions.

(If you have not done so already in Explorer under Options [Win10 View > Options > View] or [WinXP Tools > Folder options < View ] and uncheck 'Hide extensions for known file type'. Stupid default by Microsoft)

These files without extensions 'Archive', 'Drafts', 'Inbox', 'Sent', 'Junk' are your actual "Mail Folders" in SeaMonkey. If you has subfolder then they will be named "Archive.sbd".

8) Identify what you want to transfer. For example if you want to save your Inbox, Sent, and Archive, and your archives have subfolders which it would for each year then *copy* these files:

'Inbox', 'Sent', 'Archive' and the folder 'Archive.sbd' to some removable media, or network location, or temp location to burn on CD/DVD-R

9) You now need to prevent *overwriting* your current mail so you *must* change the names of these files and folders before moving to your new computer. I suggest something obvious:

Inbox => OldInbox
Sent => OldSent
Archive => OldArchive
Archive.sbd => OldArchive.sbd

10) Once renamed you can add these files and folders to your new computer If you still have it running and Explorer open to your profile, great! If not, you can use the WinKey+R method with "%APPDATA%\Mozilla\SeaMonkey\Profiles" to find your profile then traverse to "something.default: > Mail > "mail.yourisp.com" mail profile.

Copy these "Old*" files and folders along side existing Inbox, Sent, etc there.

11) Start SeaMonkey and Open Mail & Newsgroups window.

NOTE: There may be a delay depending on the size of your old legacy mail you just transferred as SeaMonkey builds the *.msf mailbox indexes. Once complete you will discover your old mail is in there in their respective "new" folders OldInbox, OldSent, etc. You can now drag and drop messages from these "Old*" folders to the respective folders to consolidate and restore your old mail.

12) Once your are certain that you recovered your legacy mail your can delete the temporary "Old*" folders in SeaMOnkay and you can dump the CYA backup of your profile created back in step 4.

HTH

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com
_______________________________________________
support-seamonkey mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey

Reply via email to