I have an IMAP mail server and use Thunderbird as my client. I didn't understand the sychronization of client-server using IMAP vs POP. My IMAP server was filling up, so I logged onto the server and deleted the Inbox thinking that Thunderbird had local copies of the mail.
When I opened Thunderbird, it synched against the IMAP server and marked all my email as deleted. The emails still exist in the {path}/thunderbird/profile/default/INBOX file fortunately. After some research on the net, I edited that file and changed all the “X-Mozilla-Status:0001" to "“X-Mozilla-Status:0000".
When I brought Thunderbird back up, the emails were still gone. Does anyone know how to recover these?