Recuva observations

I installed and used Recuva on 11 April, hoping to recover a few OE Emails that had been accidentally deleted.

I find Recuva highly impressive, easy to use, perfect recovery of all deleted Emails and no trouble at all. Thank you so much Piriform for producing such a remarkable program.

Limitations - All Emails deleted in the normal way are recovered perfectly, but Emails deleted by a sandbox program are lost forever. This is I suppose to be expected., they are in a virtual environment and treated as threats. I lost a few Sent and Received Emails between 2 April and 10 April due to stopping and disabling a sandbox Program - Toolwiz Timefreeze.

They were not important, but intensely annoying to lose. I did not realize that my OE was sandboxed by Toolwiz Timefreeze. The accident occurred by checking the "Folders" option. ALWAYS leave this option unchecked when using this program. Ah well, we live and learn.

Question ? All the recovered OE Emails came up with a Thunderbird icon and on opening, the mail was displayed on Thunderbird ! What if the user has not got Thunderbird ? What happens then ? Perhaps somebody can explain the Thunderbird aspect.

Keyscrambler - If you use this program or any other key scrambling program, then ALL deleted and recovered SENT Emails will be displayed in gobble-de-gook and be no use at all. ALL RECEIVED Emails are OK and perfectly readable as most senders do not use key scrambling on their Email systems.

This has learnt me to switch Keyscrambler OFF when constructing a SENT Email so that on recovery, the text will be normal. I have at present dumped Toolwiz Timefreeze in sheer anger, but it is a good program and ideal now that Win XP has been orphaned by MS. I will probably re-install it, but will make sure the "Folders" option is NOT checked next time, so that all Email folders are exluded from being sandboxed.

I suppose a big failing of Recuva is that although all the deleted Emails are listed and can be read in a file created by the Recuva program, there is no RESTORE facility to restore the Emails back to their original folders in the Email program, which is exactly what the users wants.

This results in only doing half the job instead of fully completing it.

I installed and used Recuva on 11 April, hoping to recover a few OE Emails that had been accidentally deleted. I find Recuva highly impressive, easy to use, perfect recovery of all deleted Emails and no trouble at all. Thank you so much Piriform for producing such a remarkable program. Limitations - All Emails deleted in the normal way are recovered perfectly, but Emails deleted by a sandbox program are lost forever. This is I suppose to be expected., they are in a virtual environment and treated as threats. I lost a few Sent and Received Emails between 2 April and 10 April due to stopping and disabling a sandbox Program - Toolwiz Timefreeze. They were not important, but intensely annoying to lose. I did not realize that my OE was sandboxed by Toolwiz Timefreeze. The accident occurred by checking the "Folders" option. ALWAYS leave this option unchecked when using this program. Ah well, we live and learn.
Yeah, chalk it up as a learning experince in proper use of sanboxes.

Question ? All the recovered OE Emails came up with a Thunderbird icon and on opening, the mail was displayed on Thunderbird ! What if the user has not got Thunderbird ? What happens then ? Perhaps somebody can explain the Thunderbird aspect.
Sounds to me that on your particular computer you allowed at some point for thunderbird to take over the file association for those files (the three/four letter exention at the end of the name after the period).[edit] Other people, without thunderbird, would have a different experience.

Keyscrambler - If you use this program or any other key scrambling program, then ALL deleted and recovered SENT Emails will be displayed in gobble-de-gook and be no use at all. ALL RECEIVED Emails are OK and perfectly readable as most senders do not use key scrambling on their Email systems. This has learnt me to switch Keyscrambler OFF when constructing a SENT Email so that on recovery, the text will be normal. I have at present dumped Toolwiz Timefreeze in sheer anger, but it is a good program and ideal now that Win XP has been orphaned by MS. I will probably re-install it, but will make sure the "Folders" option is NOT checked next time, so that all Email folders are exluded from being sandboxed.
Again, just like sandboxes, the point of keyscramblers is to make things like recuva not work. It is the entire reason to use those methods, to not allow the recovery of the removed items.

I suppose a big failing of Recuva is that although all the deleted Emails are listed and can be read in a file created by the Recuva program, there is no RESTORE facility to restore the Emails back to their original folders in the Email program, which is exactly what the users wants. This results in only doing half the job instead of fully completing it.
Recovery programs cannot, and should not, differentiate type of file;they are file recovery; they search a hard drive for old files that, though deleted from an operating system, aren't actually deleted until the OS needs that hard drive space. If a program, in this case OE, doesn't store the when, and where on the location (especially since the location it would place it would be the program's trash folder) then recuva wouldn't be able to put it there.There are, perhaps, specialized programs for recovery of a certain file (again, in this case OE emails) but that is not the purpose of a general file recovery tool (in this case recuva)

@ Nergal

Thanks for that helpful post.

I cannot understand why Thunderbird has hijacked my OE .dbx files. Like everybody else, over the years I have switched default from OE to Thunderbird and back again. It is a normal routine of preference. OE has been my default for about 3 years now.

Why then is Thunderbird remotely associated with OE .dbx data files ?

Because thunderbird asked you for default access and oe didn't. You can reset this through control panel or default program editors

But both Thunderbird and OE DO ask for default access, see :-

Thunderbirddefaultpanel_zpsc8b6ac52.jpg

OEdefaultpanel_zps7c443e41.jpg

I am beginning to think that it is Recuva that has Thunderbird as the default mail opener. Can somebody with both Thunderbird and OE show me a screen shot of OE icons from a quick Recuva test ?

Here is my Thnderbird dominated output :-

Recuva2_zps32a8083c.jpg

I do not see many Recuva OE screen shots, I wonder why ?

Thunderbird still has control pf that file type, this is STILL your PC not recuva. Recuva has no facility to make thunderbird or any app the default opener. It's not in its abilities.

I do not see many Recuva OE screen shots, I wonder why ?

Because OE was rarely used when it existed and now, along with XP is end of life

Because OE was rarely used when it existed and now, along with XP is end of life

My grief is unbearable. XP will be around 10 years from now.