Restoring mail

arsenal

Hi all,

So the story is I've an external hard drive with basically everything from my mac dragged and dropped into it.

Yesterday one of my email a/c's expired, I hit disable a/c in preferences because I kept getting annoying messages asking for the password. I THOUGHT this would just stop it looking for new mails, sometime after that the laptop started chugging along very slowly and I couldn't figure out what was going on until I realised that is was deleting ALL the mails from that a/c from the mail application. Now I have no trace of that a/c in mail and a trash full of years of email attachments!

So my question is, is there a copy of the mail in that a/c somewhere on my external hard drive? Can I import it back into mail from the drive? I just want them there to search etc? As in I don't want mail to keep trying to pull down mail from that server but would like to have everything so far still available to look through in mail.

Any help GREATLY APPRECIATED!!!!!!!!!!!!

barryj

Though you don't say what mail app you are using, I'll assume Apple's 'Mail' is what you were using.

If this is the case, then then the mails for each account are usually stored in a folder in the ~/Library/Mail folder in your home directory. Assuming you backed this up, you should have a copy of this folder. The name of the folder should indicate which account it was.

After this I'm guessing, but if you re-enable the account, and then repopulate the folder from your backup, it might work - haven't tried this - just guessing.

- barry

Sad Professor

Do you have a Time Machine backup? It would make restoring your mail account a lot easier.

arsenal

No unfortunately no time machine backup just a straight drag and drop onto a USB external hard drive

Liameter

For future reference, the messages are stored in the Mail folder at
home -> Library -> Mail

The list of accounts is stored in the preference file at
home -> Library -> Preferences -> com.apple.mail.plist

To avoid the problem you've just discovered, it is important to store a copy of the Mail folder AND of the com.apple.mail.plist file.

These can be restored simply by drag and drop.

I keep an automatic copy of my "home" folder every night (automated using Chronosync) and also make occasional manual copies.

http://www.glodark.com/apple_mail.htm

arsenal

Thanks for the help guys,

So...I dragged and dropped the a/c folder from the backed up library and the "com.apple.mail.plist" file to the preferences, I got all my mails back in the list but when I try and look at them I just get a message for everyone in that a/c that says...

"The message xxxxxxxx has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it.)

Am I fighting a lost cause here? Any suggestions?

barryj

arsenal wrote: »

"The message xxxxxxxx has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it.)

Am I fighting a lost cause here? Any suggestions?

Mail clients may only partially download a message until you actually read it. So unless you have actually read the message in question it may only have the headers of the mail and maybe the first few lines of the message.

Does this happen for all your messages? Is there one you know you read in full that you could test on?

- barry

Liameter

Make sure that Mail is not active (not launched) when you do the drag and drop transfer.
Rebuilding the folders in Mail might help.

Mailbox --> Rebuild