Issue with deleting e-mails from Thunderbird

Question

Today, a family member was going through her "Important" folder in Thunderbird. She decided to experiment a bit and deleted items from a range of dates out of that folder.

After deleting those e-mails; every folder she went into (including the inbox) - exculding "Sent Mail" - deleted e-mails from that date range. They didn't visibly delete until she clicked into a particular folder and they then quickly went away (one by one I might add).

So there's really three questions here. What went wrong? How do we fix it (so this doesn't continue to happen)? And, can we get the lost e-mails back (if so, how)?

At this point in time, I don't know much else. I don't know when the last time was that Thunderbird updated and I wasn't present to see what buttons were pushed or what - if any - settings were changed during the deleting process.

I will add one thing though, I did watch e-mails begin to disappear out of several folders and discovered that the process could be stopped - temporarily at least - by hitting the "Stop" button at the top of the screen.

Answer 1

A guess, mails have been deleted from search interface, which goes thru several folders.

For what concerns email recovery, this is a bit old, but it still did apply less than two years ago (last time I had to follow it). Use at your own risk.