Recover part of deleted email that has been indexed

[wolfstarde]

wolfstarde last edited by

Hi folks,

I have a technical problem - I wrote an article in Opera Mail, decided to split it into two separate articles, so cut the second half to the clipboard and sent the first half to my publisher. I then forgot to paste the text I'd cut into a fresh mail and lost it from the clipboard. BUT: it's still there, somewhere, and it's been indexed, because when I search for it, the original mail comes up in my Sent folder. How can I access Opera's index (the "lexicon" file?) to recover the deleted text?

Thanks

[burnout426]

burnout426 Volunteer last edited by

I wrote an article in Opera Mail, decided to split it into two separate articles, so cut the second half to the clipboard and sent the first half to my publisher.

If you modified the draft you were composing and sent the message, the sent message should only contain the first half where it's missing the part you cut out. If you decided to compose a new message again and cut that part out and you didn't discard the original draft with both parts still in it, a draft should be in "All Messages/Draft" that has both parts.

Either way, you could look in "All Messages/Sent" or "All Messages/Drafts" (or maybe even "All Messages/Outbox" if it got stuck there for some reason) to find it. Just make sure you click the "settings for this view" button on the message list toolbar and set "show sent" for each view. Set "Show Sent" for "All Messages/Trash" and or check "Show Trash" for "All Messages/Sent" and "All Messages/Drafts".

BUT: it's still there, somewhere,

The source of a message is stored in the "store" folder. See this page for more info. You can use Windows search to search the folder. Drafts for all accounts are stored in the "Drafts" folder in the store folder.

So, if the body text is still around, it'll be in there whether Opera has that message in its database or not.

lexicon

The lexicon files represent the search index where the source of messages are split up into words for faster searching (as opposed to searching the source of each file). It's possible the words for that one draft are still there, but it's a binary file that you'd have to reverse-engineer and write a program to extract info out of it. Now, if the message is really gone, you can close down Opera and delete the lexicon folder to have Opera rebuild a new one based on just the files Opera currently knows about. This won't help with you finding the text of course.

That's about all I can think of.

[wolfstarde]

wolfstarde last edited by

Thanks, that's a good comprehensive answer. I've already been in the message store and it's not there. The notes I deleted only exist as a "ghost" in the lexicon, I just wanted to know whether there was any way of reading the lexicon files. Now I know - no! Thank you I've accepted they're gone, it's not too much of a disaster, I can remember a lot of them, it's just the not knowing...