icedove email POP3

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iceburn
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Joined: 12/07/2019

I made the mistake of deleting most of the emails, 4 years worth, thinking they would still be on the server. Forgot that even though the 'leave messages on server' was ticked, so was 'until i delete them'. After downloading all the email the first time, all the old mail was deleted from my HD and server and, now it's gone.

Is there a way to search my non encrypted HD for deleted stuff ?

yrk
yrk

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Joined: 08/28/2012

name at domain writes:

> I made the mistake of deleting most of the emails, 4 years worth,
> thinking they would still be on the server. Forgot that even though
> the 'leave messages on server' was ticked, so was 'until i delete
> them'. After downloading all the email the first time, all the old
> mail was deleted from my HD and server and, now it's gone.
>
> Is there a way to search my non encrypted HD for deleted stuff ?
>

testdisk/photorec is supposed to be a file recovery tool. It is in the
repos:

testdisk - Partition scanner and disk recovery tool, and PhotoRec file
recovery tool

Good luck.

--
"Cut your own wood and it will warm you twice"

Magic Banana

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Joined: 07/24/2010

PhotoRec is, indeed, great. Stop using your system (to avoid the free space to be rewritten) and work from a Live system. You can install the "testdisk" package on Trisquel's live system, for instance. See https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step for step-by-step instructions.

And, then, install a backup system!

iceburn
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Joined: 12/07/2019

I ran the scan on the Linux partition and now have nearly 700 folders. To delete them it asks for p/w every folder. I can't go through thousands of files like this.
How do you delete these recup_dir folders all at once ?

Magic Banana

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Joined: 07/24/2010

Giving 'sudo rm' every folder. Not one by one but all at once, using the character * in the shell.

nadebula.1984
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Joined: 05/01/2018

Before deleting, make a backup of them (in case of that there are some desired e-mail files in it). For example:

tar zcvf backup.tgz recup_dir*

Then delete recup_dir directories using command:

rm -rf recup_dir*

iceburn
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Joined: 12/07/2019

when rm -rf recup_dir* is run with terminal it fails to delete and says permission denied.

Magic Banana

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Joined: 07/24/2010

That is why you need to precede the command with "sudo ", as I wrote in my last post in this thread.

iceburn
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Joined: 12/07/2019

The deletion worked, thanks. Strangely there is now 4% less space on /dev/sda6/home directory.

iceburn
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Joined: 12/07/2019

Hi, using photorec how do you search for only icedove email files ? .eml ?

Magic Banana

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Joined: 07/24/2010

Plain text files. Looking at my archives in ~/.icedove/*/Mail/Local Folders/*/ they are single huge text files.

iceburn
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Joined: 12/07/2019

I messed up again. Even starting with sudo nothing shows.

Magic Banana

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