Email has its limitations but it still remains an important and valuable tool for communication in all facets of life. No matter whether you tag, star, file, or flag a message there still is a possibility an important message is lost and deleted. While generally every webmail or email client has a Trash or Deleted Items folder to capture deleted messages one last time before the ultimate purge – things still fall through the cracks; likely because cleaning out this folder is treated as an all or nothing process. We don’t selectively remove messages from a Trash folder after all.

Prevent Delete is a Mozilla Thunderbird add-on that makes an excellent attempt at solving the problem. Prevent Delete leverages the built-in message tagging feature of Thunderbird. Emails marked as Important are automatically protected from deletion while the add-on is active. However if this tag is used for all types of email messages you are free to use any other defined tag of your choosing.

Configuration is simple and straightforward – as one would imagine. You may either have a  second confirmation for deletion on the Important messages or out-right prevent deletion in the first place – probably the appropriate option in this instance.

Prevent Delete captures delete request both by the button and from the right-click context menu within Thunderbird. Unfortunately, if multiple messages are selected and deleted at once the add-on fails to protected anything – a limitation that is hopefully addressed in future versions.

Download Prevent Delete