Lost emails in Inbox after rebuild

Question

Hi all,
After I rebuilt my Inbox, my messages were lost. I've looked at the INBOX.mbox package contents, and judging by its file size, it looks like all of my past emails are gone. Were my emails permanently deleted or is there someway to retrieve them?
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Sorry but it looks like the messages are lost. The mbox package file is the file that stores all messages and message attachments for a Jaguar or Panther mailbox. When an "overstuffed" mailbox issue or corruption occurs, some of the other package content files for the mailbox stores some of the messages which can be recovered by other means but although the content_index file is a little larger than normal, nothing appears out of place and the mbox file is only 1.2 MB now.
Although 3.31 GB of free hard drive space seems like a lot or enough not to cause any problems, paging/virtual memory is probably this size at least and if it goes over this amount on your Mac depending on activity, data loss can occur.
I would free up some hard drive space to get the free space over 5GB minimum and as the link I provided indicates, more free space is better.
And although very unfortunate, maybe this will be motivation to start maintaining a regular backup saved to an external drive. I use SuperDuper! maintaining a complete bootable clone of my hard drive saved to a Firewire drive used for backup purposes only.
It isn't a matter of if but when your hard drive has a complete or partial failure since none last forever. I learned this lesson the hard way several years ago. Without warning, I experienced a complete hard drive failure on a G3 PowerBook less than 1-yr old. Apple replaced the hard drive under the standard 1-yr warranty period but none of my existing data was recoverable and I didn't maintain a backup at the time. I lost everything but it motivated me to start maintaining a regular backup.