wayne-out-there

How to Recover your Thunderbird Emails with Free and Open Source software

I wanted to post this post right away to make sure anyone in my boat knows there is help coming soon.  It took me almost a month to figure out how to do this so I hope you will save a month and even more important, a lot of pain and money.

The actual tutorial is coming as soon as I can finish it.  I’m trying to make it very easy so that more people can benefit but believe me it wasn’t easy.

Stay tuned and don’t hesitate to keep pushing me daily to get this blog done.

Here is the start of the blog post:

How to Recover your Thunderbird Emails from an erased hard drive Disaster

So, you’ve accidentally erased your hard drive and all your email is gone?  Perhaps you’ve already got all your photos back like I did by some simple forensics software but your emails are gone.  For some reason it seems that the forensics software (free ones) do everything except save your email.  I came across many paid pieces of software that claimed they could do it but I was convinced if open source and government level software could recover photos and PDFs that surely there was a way.  I was right, thank goodness.  I am creating this tutorial for you to follow and hopefully recover your email as well.

Before we begin, let’s take a quick look at what we need to accomplish:
1. Carve your emails out of your hard drive
2. Get those emails into an email client so you can actually read them (we’ll use the best – Thunderbird)
3. Sort the meat from the bones so that everything recovered is in an effective and searchable format.

What you need before you begin:

1. A gigantic external hard drive – at least twice as large as the total size of the drive you lost.  You should have one of these anyways to prevent this disaster from happening again in the future so it’s a good investment and much cheaper than what you would pay to have a professional recover your files (upwards of $2000.00)
2. A computer running Ubuntu 13.10.  This tutorial [insert tutorial} will help you
3. A basic understanding of Ubuntu 13.10 including how to find the terminal and how to open applications.  This tutorial will help you {insert tutorial}
4. The software Foremost installed on your computer via the terminal/command line.  This tutorial will help you {insert tutorial}

….stay tuned for more as I can…