Anyone know of a computer program to find OLD e-mail on a Hard Drive?

[Up2Late]

I just found out that my Childhood best friend died on Saturday, and I'm fairly sure that I have some of his old e-mails on my hard drive and I'd really like to find and recover.

The e-mail I'm looking to recover are from back when I was having some trouble with Windows 95/98SE. I probably had to reload those Operating Systems a dozen time each, but it seemed like almost every time I did, I lost my Netscape and saved AOL e-mail.

Plus, I've had a few hard drives crash over the years, so I probably have dozens of e-mail and spam that I'd like to find and recover, and then delete the spam.

So, anyone know of anything that would help?:shrug:

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. What email program(s)?

n/t

[Up2Late]

2. Netscape mail and or AOL mail

I think Netscape Mail was about the same from version 2.x to version 4.x, mostly Netscape 4.x and AOL mail from ver 4.x to 8.x, though they don't necessarily need to be the same program.

[5X]

6. AOL email is saved on their servers unless you deliberately .....

saved it to your hard drive.

[Up2Late]

11. Yes, I know that, but in "the old days" of 28.8bps modems...

...and $19.95 for 20 hours and $4.95 for each additional hour that I'm talking about, we (or I) would download all my new mail and then read it off-line to save those hours for the AOL Chatrooms, which were all on-line "live" chat.

That was about the time that Spam was invented too, which was really annoying, because it ate up all your monthly minutes if you opened your mail on-line

[alcibiades_mystery]

3. If you reloaded the OS

they're going to be hard to find, if they're not gone forever.

[Master Mahon]

4. Try Email search

http://people.yahoo.com/

http://emailsearch.addresses.com/email.php

[greyl]

Ontrack Fix-it Utilities

includes a file undeleter. The older the files, the less your chances of recovery, but it may be worth a shot.

[BlueJazz]

5. "Old" is the Key here. You've probably written over the spaces

..so many times that it would be impossible to recover anything.

Um...When you write to a hard-drive, you're not necessarily putting
the ones and zeros "in order" or what I'm trying to say is: His mail was (most likely) spread ALL OVER the hard-Drive and has been written over.

Sorry.

[TahitiNut]

7. All common email clients I know of store email as delimited text files ...

... essentially in the same form as it's transmitted on the Internet (SMTP). Thus, using Windows' buit-in "Find: All Files..." function and using the catch-all wildcard file name "*.*" and using a text string that would be unique to the email sought would probably work as well as anything.

[Wisconsin Larry]

8. There are several issues and a few things you can try.

The bad news. Often reloading operating systems formats the hard drive meaning everything is wiped clean. If the disc was not reformatted, data recovery has its best chance shortly following the crash. Ultimately, the space is re-written wiping out the old files. Finding a data recovery program for Windows 95 may be difficult. I am assuming that you are on Windows 98SE at the current time?

The good news, sorta. Assuming that the hard drive has not been reformatted, there are several data recovery programs out there. I went thru a disk crash about 3 years ago and tried a few. I think that the one that worked the best was from Ontrack. http://ontrack.com/easyrecoverydatarecovery/

Ontrack has a free consulting service (phone) and a free trial version on the URL above. A call to them may be worth the time. Downloading and running the free trial version (which is compatible with SE amongst other OS's) will be enlightening as well.

Also Netscape has always used straight text files to store mail which means if you recover anything like Inbox, etc you can read it and edit it with Wordpad. You may have multiple copies of Netscape (different versions) on your computer and doing a search from "My Computer" on the C drive for Inbox*.* may bring up some older mail.

[Up2Late]

10. Excellent! I think I figured that out about Notepad at some point...

...but since I sort of stumbled across it, I forgot. :yourock:

Check out this old gem:

Date: Tue, 28 Apr 1998 14:14:12 -0700 (PDT)

From: Microsquish <[e-mail]>

Subject: Re: IE 4.0 and AOL 3.0

To: --------@--------
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
X-Mozilla-Status: 8011

Nah! When Win95 came out, everyone switched because
it has a better interface, and it supported 32bit
apps. But come on! Win98 is not a big improvement on
Win95, yet it costs more for the upgrade. Even though
I don't hate MS, recent "innovations" just pisses me
off so badly b/c it tricks people in buying there
stuff. Now these cheaters are getting $ not by making
good products, but by trapping the consumers like us.
See, Win98 looks almost exactly like Win95+IE4's
Active Desktop. Yeah sure, there's some minor
updates, but who the heck is going to use Infrared
communications (a stupid feature supported by 98)?
Now your desktop looks like webpage, and your system
has gotten slower and slower...... Win95 can be ran
on a 486DX-25 w/ less than 16MB RAM. Now 98 wants a
DX66 w/ at least 16 megs. This time, once you install
98, you can't get rid of IE4, whether u like it or not.

Of course, Communicator won't be affected by Win98.
If MS made this new OS so that it can't run Netscape
products, Netscape will just sue the butts off of MS.

O.K., now the hard part, doing that still gives me a lot of code (html I think) and pictures the are just big blocks of letters and numbers, is there a way to get these to open in Netscape or Mozilla Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird so that I can see the graphics and pictures?

When I found all the "inbox" files, there is also a corresponding inbox.snm file which is much smaller.

And now on my WindowsXP Computer the corresponding file are inbox.msf files. Note that I mostly switched to the generic Mozilla version on this machine.

OR

Should I just try to open the same file in Firefox or Mozilla web-browser or Mozilla Composer (their html editing program)? :shrug:

[Wisconsin Larry]

12. You can get these to open in Netscape and I would assume

Mozilla as well but I am not familiar with Mozilla. And it wouldn't hurt to try to open them in Mozilla composer.

For Netscape you will need the inbox and inbox.msf files (or inbox.snm). There's a couple of ways to do this but this is probably the safest.

In XP, Netscape puts its mail files in the Documents and Settings folder, e.g., on my machine it is:
c:\Documens and Folders\Larry\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\uo1wy24.slt\mail
On older versions of Netscape, it was buried under C:\program files\netscape\...

Anyway assuming that the inbox files that you found are not your current inbox (the date on these files should verify this), you would need to move them into a folder that Netscape (or Mozilla) can see. Either rename them as oldmail and move them into the folder that holds the current inbox, sent, ect. files. Or move them into another folder listed under the mail folder. Or open a New Account which will create a corresponding folder that the old inbox files into.

For example, my Netscape mail has a "local folders" account (folder) that has empty files in it. So coping the old "inbox" files to it doesn't destroy any current files. Note that you will need to move both the "inbox" file and the corresponding inbox.msf to get this to work. The smaller file is the index to the larger file holding all the mail. If you have multiple old inbox files some of these will have to be renamed if you wish to move them all. And you will have to match up the inbox and the inbox.msf files using the date prior to renaming them.

[Up2Late]

13. Thanks for that, I'll try it when I get back...

...I'm flying to Indiana, in a few hours, to go to my late friend's Wake, so I really should pack and try to get some sleep.

I'll try to post an update Friday.

[Norrin Radd]

9. Try this free Windows Desktop search:

http://www.download.com/Windows-Desktop-Search/3000-2343_4-10531108.html?tag=lst-0-1

It can index everything on your hard drive and hasten the search process--it is faster and more accurate than the search function that comes with Windows.

Or try any other search software that will index your hard drive.