# where to find the unfinished mail if power is off



## nuohai (May 5, 2013)

Greetings everyone, 

I was writing a mail for a long time in PuTTY, using Pine. But the computer power went off. Can freebsd FreeBSD's mail system have saved my unfinished mail somewhere? Where can I find it? 

Thank you all!


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## fonz (May 5, 2013)

Try looking around in your mail directory, which is typically ~/Mail or something similar. There might be a file called dead.letter in there.

There's also a chance that the editor you were using has stored a swap file somewhere. Since you were using PuTTY I'll assume you were using Vi(m). In that case, check for a *.**.swp file in /tmp and see if there's anything in /var/tmp/vi.recover/.

However, there's also a chance that you're just out of luck. In that case, I suppose the lesson learned is to occasionally _save your work_ when writing long mails


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## SirDice (May 5, 2013)

nuohai said:
			
		

> I was writing a mail for a long time in PuTTY, using Pine. But the computer power went off. Can freebsd FreeBSD's mail system have saved my unfinished mail somewhere? Where can I find it?


It hasn't been sen*t* to the mail system yet so you won't find it there. And unless Pine saves draft emails it's most likely gone.


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## ShelLuser (May 5, 2013)

nuohai said:
			
		

> I was writing a mail for a long time in PuTTY, using Pine.


Actually it's the other way around; you wrote the mail using Pine (and its internal editor) while using PuTTY ;-)

Unfortunately I'm quite sure that your e-mail is gone. It's been a while since I've used Pine myself, but it has no support for automatically saving your work.


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