[Whatever]

Accidentally deleted all e-mail from trash. Can I retrieve the messages? I have comcast and thunderbird for my e-mails.

[Steve Nagy]

You may be out of luck.

You can try using a free program called Recuva. I have used it in the past ... sometimes it can recover what you are looking for, sometimes it can't.

If you want to go that route, I would suggest you install it and run it immediately and do NOTHING else on yourcomputer - AT ALL! The success of the program depends on what sectors have been written over.

[memason]

It might depend upon how you set up Thunderbird. If you let Thunderbird delete email from the server, as they were downloaded, you might be out of luck.

My suggestion: Log into your Comcast account and go to email. If you did not have Thunderbird delete emails, ALL of your emails will be there

Good Luck!

[KayakerNC]

You might try installing Windows Live Mail.
Before I closed my TWC cable account, I put it on my laptop and it migrated ALL of my email messages. Not sure about the deleted ones though. Still it would be worth a try.

[Figmo Bohica]

Contact the NSA, they have a copy of all your email.

[quirky3]

Originally Posted by memason

It might depend upon how you set up Thunderbird. If you let Thunderbird delete email from the server, as they were downloaded, you might be out of luck.

My suggestion: Log into your Comcast account and go to email. If you did not have Thunderbird delete emails, ALL of your emails will be there

Good Luck!

This may work! Go to XFINITY by Comcast -- Official Customer Site | Email | Watch TV Online and log in from there. I think that is a separate (but duplicate) repository for your emial that you see on your home computer through Thunderbird.

[Joaniesmom]

Just curious here. Do all these "repositories" mean that our e-mails are never actually deleted, even though we think they are? Do they live on forever in cyber-space?

[quirky3]

I agree with MEMASON that it depends how you have it set up. I set up my comcast account to sync up with my blackberry and make emails available there too. I have noticed that after I delete some emails on my laptop, they are still available through my blackberry. I have my blackberry set up to automatically delete all emails greater than 30 days old.

But, that being said - I imagine that comcast "backs up" their emails somewhere in case of the need to recover. Also, I'm not sure how encrypted any of the emails are, so they could be vulnerable to hackers and technical system administrators. Also, like you see on CSI, even when you delete something on your home computer, it stays in memory until it is overlaid by something new.

I try to be careful and never send important info like social security numbers, bank account numbers, or passwords in an email because of the chance it could get hacked.

[memason]

Originally Posted by quirky3

I agree with MEMASON that it depends how you have it set up. I set up my comcast account to sync up with my blackberry and make emails available there too. I have noticed that after I delete some emails on my laptop, they are still available through my blackberry. I have my blackberry set up to automatically delete all emails greater than 30 days old.

But, that being said - I imagine that comcast "backs up" their emails somewhere in case of the need to recover. Also, I'm not sure how encrypted any of the emails are, so they could be vulnerable to hackers and technical system administrators. Also, like you see on CSI, even when you delete something on your home computer, it stays in memory until it is overlaid by something new.

I try to be careful and never send important info like social security numbers, bank account numbers, or passwords in an email because of the chance it could get hacked.

This is correct.... When you configure your email client on your computer, there is an option to delete emails, from the server, once they are downloaded to your computer. If you do not check that option, all of your email remains on the server (Comcast, in this case) indefinately. If, however, you checked the delete option, all of your emails are gone.

I use Google and never delete anything, so I have about 4,000 emails out on their server. Believe it or not, I search for 3 or 4 year old emails sometimes...

[rustynail]

Originally Posted by Whatever

Accidentally deleted all e-mail from trash. Can I retrieve the messages? I have comcast and thunderbird for my e-mails.

Probably can't without professional help

[Figmo Bohica]

All joking aside about the NSA, there are companies that specialize in recovery of hard drive data. Everything on your hard drive is still there unless you have filled the HD up, then it starts over writing. It is expensive for data recovery, so in the future if you want to save all your email, get an external HD and copy all email to the external HD. They are not that expensive and could save you lots of heart aches.

All my documents and important items are saved on my C drive plus a copy on an external HD. Everyone should, just like in real estate, only it is, backup, backup, backup. When your computer goes TU, you will really start wishing the you had done the backup thingie. I back my wife's computer up for her once a week. Mine is backuped daily, automatically.

[Steve Nagy]

Figmo is correct. At the risk of flogging the horse: When you delete a file, it is not actually erased. Instead, the sectors that the erased file occupied are simply marked as available. Until which time as you actually create something that uses the sectors formerly occupied by your file and now marked available, your data still exists.

The program I referenced earlier, Recuva, does a reasonable job at reconstructing your file from the physical sectors ... assuming they have not been overwritten with data from a new file. This is essentially what a data recovery lab does. That is why your chances of successfully saving your data depend on running this program ASAP. Every second your computer runs doing something else increases the odds that the data will be overwritten with something new (it could be something as simple as a temporary browser file.)

I think the options in this case are:

1.) Hope that your Comcast mailbox still holds your mail.
2.) Failing that, stop using your computer, install Recuva, and hope that your data hasn't been overwritten.
3.) Sorry ....