Lost mail after folder rename

I just renamed a parent folder in Mail and one of the subfolders lost all the messages in it. After doing a search in Spotlight, I assured myself that the messages are still there. When I click one of them in the spotlight list it opens the message in Mail, but in that window, when I click "show in mail viewer" it comes up empty. How should I go about fixing this situation? I'm using Mail Version 2.1 in OS 10.4.8 on a G5 dual with 3 gigs of ram and 80 gigs of free space.
MacBook Pro and G5 dual Mac OS X (10.4.8)

I can find the mailbox. Let me add some more information about what happened. After renaming the parent box, I tried to move some messages into the child box and got an error. I tried several times. I quit Mail and restarted. I then opened the child box and found that it was empty. I cursed, etc. etc. Then I moved some new messages into the box without a problem. So now the box has some messages in it, but the old ones aren't there. Then I thought of searching with Spotlight and found that the messages exist and can be read, but...where are they? Unfortunately, Spotlight doesn't give you a file name or path. I tried renaming the parent box back to the original name. I fixed permissions. Then I wrote the message to this group. I hope I haven't done too much already.

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Lost mail after upgrade from 10.3.9

I just upgraded from 10.3.9 and when I open mail, it is entirely empty.
I need my old emails. how do I restore them/get them back.

Hello,
This happened a lot when people upgraded from 10.3 to 10.4 and Mail 2.x, but the issues are nearly the same if upgrading from 10.3 to 10.5.
For background read the info in the topic at the link below, which while written about conversion from 10.3 to 10.4, would also structurally apply to a conversion from 10.3 to 10.5, even if using 10.4 in between. Sadly, it would appear the conversion process has not been strengthened, although the real fault lies with the condition of the mailboxes prior to Upgrade.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5664866&#5664866
In this situation the messages are not lost, but properly converting them for use in Mail 3.0 (or first in Mail 2.0) can be a detailed and tedious project. The best thing would be to have used Rebuild on every mailbox prior to the Upgrade. Of course I recognize it may be too late for that now, so the "devil is in the details"!
There is an issue often when going directly from 10.3.9 and Mail 1.3.11 related to conversion of the data in the mbox file into xxxx.emlx files in the Messages folder that Mail 3.x uses. The Messages folder came into use with 10.4.
An important comparison to make, after you know where to look in the Finder, is to compare the size of the mbox file in any xxxx.mbox folder to that of the Messages folder in the same mailbox. The reason to do this is check whether all messages that were in the mbox when the Upgrade was done were converted properly.
There can be issues if you ran a still earlier version of Mail, and other leftover files might then be present which could be problematic.
Please do not hesitate to ask any and all questions you need to ask to get comfortable with all you may need to do, depending on the number of large and complex mailboxes you had prior to the Upgrade.
If nothing else, be sure to read:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301315
which was mentioned the referenced topic.
Btw, if the Messages folder of any xxxx.mbox were to be near or over 2 GB all by itself there could be another problem called overstuffing.
Ernie

Lost mail after upgrade to Leopard OS X 10.5.1

I upgraded to Leopard 10.5.1 from Panther 10.3.x. Everything opened as before except all the mail in all my folders between March 2006 and the date of the upgrade. Bookmarks, applications, address books, files, settings, desktop, etc. Absolutely everything is exactly as before, but all my saved mail is gone.
Apple support (phone) wasn't much help, except to tell me that I should have done an "Archive Install". It would have been nice to know that ahead of time...there's nothing in the booklet that came with the software to suggest that, or warn you to do that. All it tells you to do is load the disc and click "Install". I'm not a techie, but a 60 year old barely computer literate soul who's very frustrated.
Given that all the mail before 2006 is still there, I have a feeling that the missing stuff is lurking somewhere. Apple suggested looking in Library>Mail>Messages, but it wasn't there.
Any help out there? Thanks.

Hello, and welcome to the Discussions.
This is a problem of incomplete and flawed conversion of mailboxes that changed in structure after 10.3.x. Most people encountered the problem converting from 10.3 to 10.4, but converting from 10.3 to 10.5 has all the same issues. Typically the data is not really lost, but considerable work must be sometimes be done to recover full functionality. Read the discussions at the following links, that while written for conversion to 10.4 and Mail 2.x, and nearly the same for your path:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=413196
and
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2685531&#2685531
The primary thing is to look for mbox files of size within xxxx.mbox folders, and not lose them before checking for what has successfully been converted into Messages folders within xxxx.mbox folders.
Ernie

Lost mail after upgrade to Tiger

My Mail program receives new mail since Tiger update and the mail that was in mailboxes other than the Inbox are fine. But all of the Inbox mail Tiger reformatted now have a message like this -
"The message from John Stoner <[email protected]> concerning “who we are” has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it."
The account is online and does receive new mail fine. I hesitate to rebuild the Inbox since I will lose all mail older than one month since that is all that is on the server.
Any ideas?

Thanks for the tip. It appears that Tiger did not like my Inbox and created two Message folders - the one that has the wierd info about getting the data from the server and one that is working with new mail. If I copy a message from the second folder (It is called Messages with a lot of numbers after it) into the basic Message folder my data shows up in Mail. Very strange but at least my mail is still there.
You can find these folders under Home/Library/Mail/POP../Inbox.mbox/

Lost mail after upgrading to Mountain Lion

Hi, new to this forum, but I upgraded to Mountain Lion from the previous version and seem to have lost the last six months mail (Mar 2012 to the date I upgraded in Nov 2012). I have found all the old mail folders, notes, etc, and imported them based on directions from other threads, but this period still remains lost for incoming and outgoing mail. I was not backing up to iCloud and it seems that the back ups I had been doing manually were not picking up recent mail. Does anyone have any other suggestions? I have not found this mail anywhere on my hard drive and can't understand why only this period of time is missing. Any help greatly appreciated. Thanks.

There is a response here:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/19975076#19975076
Hope this helps.

Lost mail after disabling and re-enabling an account

Using Mail 3.6 on Leopard 10.5.7. I was setting up new MobileMe accounts for myself and my wife. She previously had mail checking a gmail account. After the mobileme account was set up on mail, I unchecked the enable account box in the gmail account settings. When I saw the inbox was gone, I re-enabled the account and saw the inbox with the list of emails return. What I did not realize until the following day is that despite the inbox list of messages (index?) being repopulated, the attached messages were not present. So, after reading some other threads, I chose to rebuild that mailbox. After that, the list of emails is now also gone and I can't find them in the trash or junk folders either.
Is there any chance for recovery of these messages?

First pause the mirroring and shutdown the servers.
If the server network address specifies a fully qualified domain name and Ports are opened, I don't think there will
be a problem.
--Prashanth

More Lost Mail After Compacting Error

I've seen this problem in a few posts, but still have not been able to get back the missing email. While deleting a bunch of messages, I got the compaction error message, and when I restarted the email, almost all the messages were gone. I followed the steps to put the inbox on the desktop and import it back to mail, but due to its absurdly large size (1.49G, and yes, I imagine that's the root of all my problems) the mail crashed. I tried using mboxbreaker, but got "Error-48 already an item with that name" and "Error- 2753 the variable spec is not defined". Any help will be much appreciated; while the vast majority of the lost messages should have been deleted long ago, there are some important personal things amongst the sludge.

yeah, i just don't get it. the settings are exactly the same...i've made sure of that. connection doctor says everything is fine...and outmail mail works. but new mail just sits in my web based inbox, and mac mail never pulls it off...frustrating. out of all the problems i thought i might have when doing a fresh install, i didn't expect this one.
jon.

Lost Mail after Reinstall of OS

I had to reinstall my OS 10.4.8 because of some issues with FileVault. Before archiving the system I backed everything up to an external storage device.
After reinstalling and reimporting all my files I realize one of the most important things that I'm missing is my Mail program's database of nearly 20k emails.
I went into my previous user's libarary>mail and imported that, but that only imported the mail folders I had created and not nearly all 20k emails.
Any idea where these emails reside and how to get them back? Is this a possiblity?
Thanks Much!

Nevermind. Figured it out reading the following thread:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=715018&#715018
Thanks!

Lost Mails after format and Import

I formatted and reinstalled my machine but when opening Mail and using the import function to restore my mailboxes and e-mails from the back-up all the software did was import the mailboxes, no mails. How do I restore my e-mails from my mailboxes and inbox in my backup?
PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.8) 2 Gig 3rd Party RAM

I re-imported mail boxes and it turns out I did it incorrectly the first time, everything is fine now!

Lost mail after POP to IMAP convertion

Help, When I converted from POP to IMAP all my former mails dissapeard. Where can I find them? My POP account is gone in the list.

Hello:
I do not know what you did when you "converted."
You should know that most POP mail applications download the mail to your device and then delete it from the server.
Hopefully you have a backup of your system before you did whatever you did.
Barry

"Sent Messages" folder not receiving new sent mails after a server change

My provider just moved my account to another server. The IMAP accounts needed to be re-established on my wife's PC in her program. So we know the files are all there on the new server.
Funny thing is that it's not working on Mail on my iBook. And when these changes took place, my sidebar contents in Mail changed on me. I have sent some mail to various places since this happened, but none of these new mails have copies which are saved in my "Sent Items" or "Sent Messages" folders. So I have no record now of anything new since the change happened. I DO have copies of mail in there that are pre-change.
I checked my preferences for mailbox behaviors, and the "Store Sent Items on the Server" is checked, so I'm not sure what's up.
For the record I'm running OS X 10.4.7 and Mail 2.1.
I have deleted and re-established my two email accounts in Mail in order to make them re-establish new links with the server, so I'm seeing my folders, but no new mail sent is showing up in my Sent Messages folder.
I would appreciate if anyone knows if there could be an issue with Mail, my new host's servers, or what. It looks like a Mail issue to me, since my wife's PC is reading everything fine (and she is running Thunderbird as her client).
Thanks!
iBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.7)
iBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.6)
iBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.7)

You're welcome.
I don't think it's your fault. Different IMAP servers use different naming conventions, and the Mailbox > Use This Mailbox For command is meant to let you tell Mail which folder should be used for what purpose, but you shouldn't have to use it just to prevent your mail from being lost. At the very least, Mail should be able to use its own default Sent Messages folder without you having to do anything. I don't know why Mail fails to do this properly so often.
Worse yet, not only does Mail sometimes fail to use the Sent Messages folder that's already there, but it doesn't even warn you that it's failing to save your sent messages as you've told it to.

I completely lost access to mail after installing iOS 6.0.1. The app 'mail' won't even open now. How do I fix this?

i completely lost access to mail after installing iOS 6.0.1. The app 'mail' won't even open now. How do I fix this?

You mean the Apple Mail app? Updated through software Update in the Apple Menu?.
Or maybe you downloaded Mail from another source?
Do you still have Snow Leopard or didn't you update your profile?

My iPad 2 lost its mail after I upgraded to IOS8. It crashes every time I click on mail. Yet, I can send photos and forward things in outgoing mail.

Lost my mail
after I upgraded to IOS8. It crashes every time I click on mail. Yet, I can send photos and forward things in outgoing mail. how to restore?

Answering my own question here. It's fixed! Another user recommended I switch to another wireless network then back to mine. And it worked! Mail is sending again with no problem.

I lost mail smart folders on iMac after delete them on Mac Air

I lost mail smart folders on iMac after delete them on Mac Air with differents mail accounts.
I don't undestand, I have email accounts totally differents between iMac and Mac Air, I don't know if is an iCloud issue.
When I open Mail on Air I see a lot of smart folders I use on iMac and I thinked of a some old sync mismatch, so I deleted smart folders on Air.
Today when I turn on my iMac I see I lost ol my smart folders, but are differents computers, differents email accounts, one used for work the other at home (gmail).
Of course I have time machine backup but don't know how to restore smart folders.
Please help me, I don't want smart folders be synced beetween differents accounts
I attach my iCloud settings...

I don't know the answer to your question, but smart folders do not actaually contain messages, just links to messages from other folders. So nothing has actually been lost. Once you recreate the smart folders, you'll see the same mail inside them that you did before.
Matt

Lost all my mails after un update

Hello
I just come back from my holidays and run the software update.
After a reboot i launch MAIL, he says me "i will migrate your mails it will takes some minutes" (i translate as i can, i am french). It takes almost 3 seconds and mail open like it was out of box : empty
Is there a way to retrieve my mails???
Thanks

I had the same problem. I followed V.K.'s advice, even though i had not read it, and looked for the files in my library/mail folder.
When I started mail after the update, it automatically set up one of my accounts, and then I manually set up the others. When I went to that folder, there were doubles of the accounts that I had set up with slightly different names - the new ones containing mail that I had revieved this afternoon, and the old ones containing the old messages.
I closed mail, copied the messages from the old inbox to the new inbox for both accounts, deleted the envelop index, and restarted.
The problem is fixed!
Hope this helps.

Lost mail after folder rename

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