Lost emails

xjohnxxjohnx
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Am running mail 1.3.9 under OSX10.3.7

Appear to have lost all my stored emails (zillions) in folders on hd, meaning all (ten) folders are all of a sudden empty after opening mail application yesterday, except for one, which had an embedded subfolder, which still contains original stored messages.

Am not aware of having done anything unusual except installed the 10.3.7 update recently.

Has anyone heard of such disater and/or can give me some idea on how to find the tons of emails somewhere on my hdrive, since I doubt they are physically erased. Thks Hans

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    jwink3101jwink3101 Posts: 739member
    Just out of curiosity, when was your last backup?
  • Reply 2 of 7
    xjohnxxjohnx Posts: 4member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Jwink3101

    Just out of curiosity, when was your last backup?



    Coming up to 6 months
  • Reply 3 of 7
    karl kuehnkarl kuehn Posts: 756member
    Before doing anything else you will want to make an "archive" of ~/Library/Mail that is where Mail.app stores all of the mail it receives. My guess is that things are already gone... but if they are still recoverable that is where they will be.



    Once you have an archive you should start poking around in that folder to see if the mailboxes there look about the right size. You can open them in a text viewer (TextEdit), the resulting file is not nice to go through, but you should be able to find the text of your messages (to reassure yourself).
  • Reply 4 of 7
    xjohnxxjohnx Posts: 4member
    Karl, the mail storage folders in the library are all empty, except for, as I said the one which has an embedded folder. That one still has my original email files.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    xjohnxxjohnx Posts: 4member
    Karl, re size, I checked, and they all appear to have different sizes, somewhat in line with what I assume the respective email file volume would be, meaning that the ones where I expect a larger amount of emails/files to reside appear to be larger (like 500k) versus others (about down to 80k with just a few emails in them). That means that most likely the files are still there except that they are"invisible"??
  • Reply 6 of 7
    karl kuehnkarl kuehn Posts: 756member
    Ok... this is good news (obviously). It probably means that your mail preferences are screwed up... un-borking that file may be a bit of work. That 6 month old backued up preference file... would you have change your mailbox layout in that time? Could you use it as a guide for re-formating that file?



    Remember: you now have a archive of your mail as it stands... play around with it and un-archive copies when you have messed it up further... but whatever you do don't check for more mail... you could loose the new stuff.



    I only have IMAP accounts (thankfully) and I make sure that a few of my servers keep rsync copies of all of that mail... 5 years worth at this point...
  • Reply 7 of 7
    jwink3101jwink3101 Posts: 739member
    I too use IMAP for these reasons. I used to keep all my mail from the past two years (except forum notifications and stuff like that) but it was becoming a huge burden when i needed to do some stuff. So now, i keep it offline. I know it isn't as secure but seeing as i back up my home folder (which has the mboxes) weekly and my whole computer every now and then, i am still secured.



    I know i really haven't been any help at all in this thread so i will will try to give some advice on avoiding this:



    Backup often (not so helpful)

    &

    If you can't use IMAP and you only check mail from one computer with one program, keep everything in the inbox with labels and select the option to not delete mail from the server. Some ISPs do not allow this and will delete old mail but it is worth a shot.
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