[Users] Recover mail from a backup --- possible?

[Rolf Turner]

Just now I (stupidly/clumsily) *deleted* an email from my inbox.  I'm
not even sure what it was, but I'd like to recover it, just in case it
was something important.  I'm pretty sure it was not a recent email;
i.e. it had been sitting around for some weeks, waiting for me to deal
with it.

I have a *fairly* recent backup of my user files on an external drive.
I believe that the backup is more recent than the email that I am
trying to recover.  I can mount the external drive and look at
/home/rolf/.claws-mail in that backup. But then I get stuck.

How do I actually get at the emails (copies of which I presume are
there *somewhere*)?  I have attached ("listing.txt") the results of
executing "ls" in /home/rolf/.claws-mail in the backup.

I have looked in "imap.cache" (the mail account in question is an IMAP
account), but everything there seems "old" (most recent date is 3
January 2021 (!!!) whereas many files in the /home/rolf/.claws-mail
directory date from 8 April 2022.  (I did the backup on 9 April 2022.)

So where do I go to look for emails that arrived in the weeks just prior
to 9 April 2022?  Or am I asking the impossible?

If there is any further information that I could/should provide, please
tell me.  If you offer instructions, may I beseech you to couch them in
simple language?  I have some computer skills, but there are yawning
lacunae in my knowledge.

Thanks for any advice.

cheers,

Rolf Turner

-- 
Honorary Research Fellow
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276
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accountrc		 filtering.log.bak	SavedAttachments/
accountrc.bak		 folderitemrc		summarysearch_adv_history
accountrc.tmpl		 folderitemrc.bak	summary_searchbody_history
actionsrc		 folderlist.xml		summarysearch_from_history
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addrbook/		 imapcache/		summarysearch_to_history
certs/			 matcherrc		tagsdb/
claws.log		 matcherrc.bak		tagsrc
claws.log.bak		 matcherrc-safecopy	tempfolder/
clawsrc			 menurc			templates/
clawsrc.bak		 messagesearch_history	themes/
command_history		 mimetmp/		tmp/
compose_save_to_history  newscache/		toolbar_compose.xml
exportldif.xml		 passwordstorerc	toolbar_main.xml
exportldif.xml.bak	 passwordstorerc.bak	toolbar_msgview.xml
fancy/			 print_page_setup	uidl/
filtering.log		 quicksearch_history