Mail and Time Machine

This morning Mail went crazy. All the messages and mailboxes disappeared, so I went back a few hours in Time Machine and "restored" mail. Now I have an inbox with messages, but the rest of the mailboxes (about 45 of them) are gone. In their place are three folders called "restored mailboxes" that do not open. I went to Mailboxes/rebuild, but my mailboxes did not reappear. I tried Time Machine again, with the same result. Is there any way to get my individual mailboxes with their messages back?
Thanks everyone

Remember, if you check e-mail with IMAP, messages are stored at the internet service provider (also known as the server) unless otherwise specified.    Only messages that are stored on your Mac will be recoverable using Time Machine.

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    For some time I have been experiencing every day issues with Safari and Mail. These apps constantly crash i.e. several times a day. Recently I noticed also some issues with Time Machine. Please find below extract form Console that may say smething about the reasons for it:
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    If not, then the last thing I would suggest is downloading Onyx (http://www.titanium.free.fr/index_us.html) for your version of Mac OS X; install and launch it, select Automation, then select "Maintenance Scripts" and under Cache, select "System" and "User" (or "System and Kernel"), depending on options what your version gives you. Uncheck everything else and click the Execute button. Restart your Mac when it's done, then test Safari again.

  • Mail and Time Machine freeze

    Hello,
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  • HT201250 I selected old mail in time machine and it will not open. How can I open it?

    I selected old mail in time machine and it will not open. How can I open it?

    Have a read here https://discussions.apple.com/message/15701309#15701309
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  • How restore aol sent mac mail from time machine?

    I am using mac mail and an imap connection to aol.  I also have a time capsule and use time machine for backing up. Yesterday I stopped receiving incoming mail in mac mail and tried deleting the aol account in mac mail and then setting it up fresh.  I was shocked to find that my 25,000 AOL sent emails did not restore! I was told by an apple genius bar rep several months ago that once mail was on my machine that the emails would NEVER be lost.  Apparently this is not true.  When I open mac mail and go into my time capsule using time machine, however, do not see the SENT mail icon under AOL--it goes away?  When I try to restore the aol mail from the day before the incident the only thing that comes up is the one Sent Mail mssg that I sent AFTER the deleting and restoring of my AOL account in mac mail. The only relevant post I have found is the one below which was posted in 2008.  Please let me know there is a way to get back my sent messages.  I can't get them directly from the aol server because the server does not save messages that are sent from any client but AOL. Thanks.
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    filed under: How-To tags: mail, timemachine Tuesday, January 29, 2008, 11:31 am
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    The hard drive on my PowerBook completely died the other day, but I luckily had been running Time Machine backups since upgrading to Leopard. (I wasn’t all that ****** off seeing as I was eager for an excuse to replace my wimpy 40Gb hard drive with a new 160Gb drive). I fumbled a bit, looking for a specific Apple Mail restore tool. I knew where all my emails lived, but I thought that Apple would have a specific means for restoring apps like Mail. So I created this mini-tutorial on how to restore Apple Mail from Time Machine simply because I could not find this method elsewhere.
    Supposedly, If you attach your Time Machine backup drive, open Apple Mail then launch the Time Machine application, you are presented with historical views of Apple Mail. This did not work for me, the historical views were just blank, so the steps below do not take this approach.
    Restoring Your Emails from a Time Machine Backup
    Warning: If you have already setup Apple Mail with your accounts and preferences, this will negate ALL your doings.
    Note: This process will restore all your email accounts, preferences, passwords, smart mailboxes, etc.
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    Before loading Time Machine, open the Finder and navigate to Home Folder (username) -> Library. In there will be a folder name “Mail”. Rename it to “Mail (default)” (Select the folder then hit the Return key to rename).
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    Control + Click the Time Machine Application and chose “Browse Other Time Machine disks…”. This, of course, brings up the historical view of your backups.
    Go back to your most recent backup (2nd window back) and navigate to Home Folder (username) -> Library. Select the “Mail” folder and click the restore button (bottom right).
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    That’s it!UPDATE (20-January-2009): After step 4., also restore ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plistThanks Jon C.
    If you have multiple mail accounts, you should also restore the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist file as well. This will ensure all of your account settings are imported. – Jon C.
    Follow me on Twitter here.
    40 Comments
    Chucho
    May 13th, 2008 at 11:11 amThanks it’s a great hint, you should post it in macosxhints.com
    Westin
    May 19th, 2008 at 3:28 amAwesome content and great instructions even for stupid people like me. Thank you so much for posting this. It worked like a charm and really is appreciated at 2:30 a.m. after hours of reinstalling junk.
    Slippery Snake
    June 23rd, 2008 at 9:15 amThis worked. However, I had three email accounts, and it only imported one. My Smart Mailboxes were not imported either.
    Jon C
    July 30th, 2008 at 2:50 pmIf you have multiple mail accounts, you should also restore the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist file as well. This will ensure all of your account settings are imported.
    Joseph Hurtado
    August 26th, 2008 at 11:23 amRaffy,This tip is worth it’s weight in gold! Thanks so much for posting such a well though out recipe for a Mail Rescue operation.Just put Jon’s advice on the article, that is also very valuable!Take care,Joseph Hurtado
    from Toronto
    Cory
    December 3rd, 2008 at 9:25 amYou saved my life! Thanks!
    Drew
    January 19th, 2009 at 12:08 amCheers Great tip! Thank you very much for your time!
    Lizart
    May 23rd, 2012 at 2:00 pmStill working in May of 2012! Thanks so much!
    source
    May 29th, 2012 at 11:11 amIm getting a teeny problem. I cant get my reader to pick up your feed, Im using bing reader by the way.
    Bruno Zysman
    May 31st, 2012 at 4:56 pmThanks so much for this tips
    I could get back my 170 000 mails in 5 hours thanks to this post, after having tried for few hours without success…Bruno

    Don't try to restore the file; restore the Note. Go in Mail to the mailbox where the note belongs. Enter Time Machine from there and step back until you find the Note.

  • Restore Archived Lion Mail from Time Machine

    I deleted a mailbox, thinking I could add it back, and synch with the server.  That worked fine, but I forgot that I had archived a whole bunch of mail on that account.   Now I want to retrieve the old mail.  I have a fresh Time Machine backup.  How do I retrieve my archived mail from Time Machine for a deleted account?

    If Time Machine was backing up before you deleted the account, you can try to enter Time Machine from
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  • How to Search Mail in Time Machine

    Although Mail's search feature isn't active when in Time Machine mode, here's a way I just figured out to search Mail e-mail messages using Time Machine:
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    EXTREMELY HELPFUL.... THANKS!!!

  • Mail in Time Machine

    Is there a way to search e-mail in Time Machine? I use Mail and when I start TM to look the search bar in Mail becomes ghosted leaving me with the one solution: look through every folder in every back up manually. Anyone have a suggestion?

    Hi,
    It seems not. It looks like you just have to go back through the various inboxes back in time.
    I tried a global spotlight search without luck.
    If the message was deleted i guess you would select the trash to view and step back until you found the message.
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    I would put in a feedback note to Apple. I will too.
    Sorry i couldn't help. May be someone has an idea.

  • Searching/Restoring Mail on Time Machine

    Hello.  I am considering a Time Capsule and Time Machine on top of my existing Crashplan subscription.  I am particularly interested in a good backup plan for backing up Mac Mail and my iCloud account, since iCloud deletes e-mails put into trash after 30 days.
    The question though is about searching my backups.  If I use Time Machine to backup Mail on my Mac and want to restore a message, is there any way to *search* for the message in Time Machine?
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    Recover items using Time Machine and Spotlight
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  • Missing mailbox and time machine

    Somehow I lost a mailbox from Mail. No problem I thought, I've got time machine. So I go to the Mail folder in my library then to the mailbox and start Time Machine. I highlight the mail box and ask time Machine to restore. What I get when I open Mail is an empty mailbox folder.
    Since the mailbox was more important than my recent mail, I opened applications and restarted Time Machine. I went back a couple of days until my mailbox was present and asked Time Machine to restore the Mail program. It did but still with an empty mailbox folder for my missing mailbox.
    So I tried again with Time Machine and actually opened my missing mailbox where I could see all the e-mail and open individual letters. It was there. I highlighted the email and Time Machine said click restore. I did and I don't think anything happened. At least my mailbox folder was still empty when I opened Mail.
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    Actually I must have done something right. If I searched Mail for an email address I knew was in my missing mailbox, it could find it and actually open the letter, but it didn't tell me where it was.
    In looking under the mailbox menu down at the bottom it says "rebuild." So I opened my empty mailbox and clicked on rebuild. Like magic, my mail reappeared.

  • I cannot access old e-mails via Time machine since installing Mountain Lion at the beginning of August.

    I cannot access old e-mails via Time machine since installing Mountain Lion at the beginning of August. I can access those received and sent since the benning of August. I can access other documents prior to August.

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  • HT201250 How can I exclude mail from Time Machine backups?

    How can I exclude mail from Time Machine backups?

    Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
    Mails are stored on ~/Library/Mail, being ~ your user folder. As you are running Snow Leopard, it's easy to exclude your mails from your Time Machine backup.
    Open System Preferences > Time Machine > Options, and add ~/Library/Mail to excluded items, so the next backup won't include mails. Note that you have to go to your user folder, in order to access to this directory

  • Search for specific E-mail in Time Machine?

    Hi,
    I have a problem with searching for E-mails in Time Machine.
    When I search for E-mails of a specific address or subject in Mail and can't find it, I enter Time Machine and in Time Machine the "search field" of the mail window is empty and all E-mails are shown.
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    I also can't use a intelligent folder with my search criteria, cause they are greyed out in Time Machine.
    Is this a "normal" behaviour or am I doing something wrong?

    Alex69 wrote:
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    I thought maybe I'm doing something wrong or this is because i excluded the Time Machine volume from spotlight, but ok, not my fault, but an apple "feature"
    I could search for specific E-mails using a finder search and then switch into Time Machine, but since Mail is called a Time-Machine-Aware Application I felt there should be a direct way to do this in Mail…
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    The approach you describe above will work for email that still currently resides on your Mac, for example an email that has been "Replied" back and forth and you wish to retrieve an earlier version of the conversation. Or perhaps a "Draft" email that has undergone changes over time, of which you need to retrieve an earlier version. In these cases using Time Machine is relatively straight forward.
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    I'm convinced, though, that the usability of Time Machine in such instances will improve over time. Particularly as more app become integrated with it.
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