eM Client Recover Your Passwords

At the moment most of the advice surrounding recovering your password from eM Client is using a piece of software costing around $49. Through perseverance and a tight budget I was able to recover my forgotten password without forking out for the software.

Here’s how I did it.

Finding the files

The first thing I did was to find where the application stored all of it’s files.

My first thoughts were that they would be stored along side the executables and libraries within the ‘Program Files’ or ‘Program Files (x86)’ folders.

My next thought was that they would be stored within the User’s AppData folders, and after a quick search they were found to be located in the Roaming Folder. For me this was:

C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\eM Client\

Files, Files Everywhere but which one do I need?

Now that I had found the files, it was a “simple” case of working out which one I needed to look at to find my password.

I initially looked for a file called accounts or users or something along those lines, upon searching through the folder and not finding any of these I was drawn to my next instinct; a file called ‘main.dat’.

I opened it in Notepad, thinking that it would probably only contain the settings and preferences for the application and nothing else useful. I could not have been more wrong.

My first surprise was the format of the file was in SQLite Format 3, good sign. A few lines further down I noticed that there was an SQL statement defining a table called AccountUIDs, which contained field referencing the Accounts table.

Hallelujah! I had found the right file.

The Needle in a HayStack

Now I had the right file finding the password was a, relatively, straight forward process with a simple answer: Search.

Using the Find function within notepad I began searching for my email address. I found a number of matches, relating to email signatures, contacts and calendar settings. Then I found one result near to a some text ‘MailClient.Accounts.ArchivingScope’, so I decided to explore the text around it.

A looked a few characters over and there was my password in all it’s cleartext beauty.

Hey Presto! Password recovered!

Summary

In short follow these simple steps:

1. Open the file ‘C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\main.dat’ in Notepad or other text editor
2. Search in the file for the text ‘MailClient.Accounts.ArchivingScope’
3. Look for your email address and password in the text following