Rebuild Mailboxes

By accident i clicked "rebuild" on my mailbox and now somehow i can not fine any of my emails after June 17th, in my inbox and sent messages. Anyone know how to find those emails??

You’re welcome.
Mail doesn’t import individual messages, only entire mailboxes. In order to import .emlx messages in Mail, they must be organized as if they were in an .mbox mailbox, i.e. they must be in a Messages folder within an .mbox folder. You can, for example, create a folder called Recovered.mbox, then a Messages folder within this folder, then put the .emlx files within the Messages folder, then import that.
In Mail, do File > Import Mailboxes, choose Mail for Mac OS X as the data format, and follow the instructions. Note that Mail wants you to select the folder that contains the mailboxes to be imported (i.e. the folder where the .mbox folders to be imported reside), not the .mbox folders themselves nor the Messages folders within them.
Given the circumstances, however, there could be something wrong with one or more of the recovered messages and that might cause the import to fail. If that’s the case, you may try organizing the recovered messages in several smaller mailboxes and try to identify the messages that Mail has trouble with. Alternatively, you may try using emlx to mbox Converter or Emailchemy to convert the .emlx files to standard mbox format, then import that in Mail as Other.

Similar Messages

"Mail cannot access your mailbox information because it's already in use. Rebuild Mailbox information Quit" Both quits Mail.

After installing Yosemite, my Mail stops working after about 20-30 seconds when this Dialog Box pops up, freezes Mail and says:
"Mail cannot access your mailbox information because it’s already in use.
Another application on your computer or on your local network is using your mailbox information. Click Quit to quit Mail. Then log out of this computer and any other computer you’re using. After you log in again, open Mail on one computer only.
If this message reappears, there may be a network server problem. Contact your system administrator to determine if it can be resolved by rebuilding your mailbox information. Then click Rebuild Mailbox Information.
If this message reappears, there may be a network server problem. Contact your system administrator to determine if it can be resolved by rebuilding your mailbox information. Then click Rebuild Mailbox Information.
Rebuild Mailbox information Quit"
Clicking on either one quits Mail. I am receiving my emails. I can even send my self a test email and receive it before it freezes up in 20-30 seconds. My ISP thinks it's a "Kernal" software problem.
Through advice by a friend, I have tried:
Applications - Utililities - Disk Utilities - and selected my hard drive and then click Repair Permissions
Rebooted a bunch of times. The first time Repair Permissions printed a few pages of stuff. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th times, it printed out this:
Repairing permissions for “Macintosh HD”User differs on “private/var/db/displaypolicyd”; should be 0; user is 244.Group differs on “private/var/db/displaypolicyd”; should be 0; group is 244.Repaired “private/var/db/displaypolicyd”
Permissions repair complete
But I still have the same problem I stated the the beginning of this:(
Any more advice?

I have the exact same issue, just after installing Yosemite. Please advise

Rebuild Mailbox Lost Emails HELP

I inadvertently clicked Rebuild Mailbox for the main INBOX of one of my POP accounts, and have lost over 8,000 important emails. I saw a few posts by others who had experienced this, but no answers that were helpful. Three attempts to restore this from Time Machine have failed, though restoration of the OTHER main POP Account's lost mail seems to have succeeded.
Really? A simple command in a menu with no explanation or warning dialogue that you are going to lose major files?
I have gone into the hidden user Library and find an entry for that Inbox, but nothing within the folder makes any sense to me at all. A complicated string of characters as a folder-name (and, no, there are no .noindex extensions anywhere) with subfolders just consisting of many folders designated by single integers.
Please help.

Hi
I'll try and explain what I did more clearly. Following advice elsewhere I created a duplicate account of one which already existed and which I had been using. I named the account differently but it was a second account of an email account I was already using. The reason I did this was to try to set it up so that I could request a read receipt on an email to one person and I read on another site that this was how to do it. Upon finding that this made no difference and without having written, send or received any emails using the new duplicate account I decided to delete it.
Once I had deleted it I went to my email to find that the emails I had previously sent and received using the original account with the same email address had all disappeared.
I checked using finder for them and I can't see them.
I am new to using a mac so bare with me.
Thanks in advance for any help or advice. I really need to try to get these emails back.

Trying to rebuild mailbox

Trying to rebuild mailbox but option is grayed out. I selected the inbox of the mailbox I need to rebuild but still nothing. Any ideas?
I'm rebuilding becuase my mailbox does not send or receive messages from the Mail app. Any other ideas besides rebuild would be welcome too!!
Thanks

Darcy186 wrote:
my mailbox does not send or receive messages from the Mail app.
Mail>Window>Connection Doctor

How do i undo rebuild mailbox

Somehow in the past few days, my display name got changed to another person's name but the email - my Comcast address - remains correct.
Many messages incoming display with the wrong name but my original correct email address.
in trying to correct this, I chose "Rebuild mailbox" but now do not want to do that until I understand that option better. That may not solve my problem.
So how do I "undo" or reverse that choice -- I do not want to rebuild my mailbox right now.
Thanks

yawza, might just have to wait for that to finish. but what you would want to tweak is
Mail > Preferences > Accounts > Full Name
that will change the display name people see.

Rebuilding mailboxes- where are my emails?

So I went to open my email mailboxes(6) with 1000s of emails. It said problem with imail. If it happens again, rebuild mailbox. I did that and all my emails were gone from over 3 years and my special saved emails in on my mac/special email mailboxes. Yes, new ones come in, but that's it.
Yes, I have time machine going and two external hard drives.
Can I get my emails back?
Please help.

I've heard of 1 password but to date haven't had the need.
BTW TM should work well however it's always wise to have redundant backups in the event one fails. Many users (myself included) do just that, I use both TM and SuperDuper for creating a bootable clone of my system. If you decide to go that route get another external HD, you can use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to create the clone both work extremely well. Here are a couple of articles from Macworld I think you would benefit from, you will see that redundant backups tend to be a common theme. The advantage of a Bootable Clone is if the internal HD fails you can boot from the clone and run until the internal HD is repaired or replaced. The advantage of TM is it's backs up very frequently, so at the most you lose an hour or so of work.
Backup Plan I, Backup Plan II & Backup Plan III.

Mail spins and rebuild mailbox is grayed

mail spins and rebuild mailbox option is grayed?

One way to test is to Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, Test for problem in Safe Mode...
PS. Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive
Reboot, test again.

Constantly having to rebuild mailboxes

Most messages I receive have the senders name changed to a previous sender, or a junk mail sender.
Clicking Mailbox - rebuild- fixes it, but then if I go to Sent messages -( same wrong name happens there as well)-on return to my Inbox - all messages have all reverted to the one new sender.
Constantly rebuilding mailboxes is wearying ! Where do I look for the culprit setting please ??

Thanks for your prompt response Ernie,
I'm using a POP account and have a separate.mac account. I did have Internet Cleanup installed(Supplier's name withheld) but it threw up some message about kernel problems so I uninstalled that. Now I keep getting messages about purchasing the product as the trial period has expired - although I had paid for that download.
I can't get rid of these popup messages as there is no sign of the original app that I can find.
That could be the cause of the problem.
The situation has got worse as this morning I have lost all my "sent" emails.
Where do I start looking to try next please ?
Thank you for the many hours you devote to helping others in the Mac forums. Your expertise makes a difference to a lot of people. Thank you.
From a large rock in the South Pacific.

Mail rebuild mailbox issue with Gmail

I set up Mail 4.6 to receive and send e-mails to and from Gmail as per the instructions on the Gmail site and used additional information on this forum.
What is happening is whenever I rebuild the gmail folder it downloads again all the files I have deleated. I rebuild after deleting a lot of Spam and e-mails I no longer need.
As recommended the account is set as a imap account.
Under the mailbox tab it is set:
DRAFTS: Store draft messages on server - box not checked
SENT: Store sent messages on server - box not checked
           Delete message: dropdown set to: One day old
JUNK: Store Junk messages on server - box not checked
          Delete message: dropdown set to: One day old
TRASH: Move deleted message to the Trash mailbox - box is checked
             Store deleted messages on the server: - box not checked
             Permanently erase Delete message when: dropdown set to: One day old
Under the Advance tab it is set:
Enable this account - box is checked
Include when automatically checking for new messages - box is checked
Compact mailboxes Automatically - is greyed out - box is checked
Keep copies of messages for offline viewing: dropdown set to: All messages and their attachments
I am not sure is this last item of 'Keep copies of messages for offline viewing' refers to the the Gmail server or the mail box - if it is the gmail server then I guess Mail is just syncronising with this; thus any mails I delete will be down loaded again. ((All the other mail servers I use I set under Advance tab to 'Remove copy from server after retrieving message' - but this option is not shown for gmail.
Two things are happening:
a) When I delete files in the Mail, Gmail folder the next time I rebuild the mail box I get 1000 + emails down loaded; even though I may only have deleted 30 or so.
b) At other time mail will show downloading e-mails in the blue download indicator, but no new emails appear.
Would welcome some direction on how to resolve these issues; thank you.

The issue with g-mail became cronic. Now I can't delete e-mails received to my gmail account.
When I try to delete emails in the gMail or Mail inbox the following message is show.
The Message could not be removed to the mailbox (null)
The destination mailbox "(null)" does not allow messages to be moved to it.
This started after following the recomendation I found in the forum to sync gmail folders to the Mail - folders.
I am looking for solution to get back to the original condition that while not what it should be it is better than now.
Was hoping for solution were I wouldn't have to delete gmail account from mail then start again.
Any ideas welcome as I would like to delete emails in the gmail folders in Gmail without logging into Gmail every time.
Thank you

Rebuild Mailbox - deleted all my emails

Hello all - I'm desperately hoping you can help me.
I have seemingly lost three years of archived emails that were stored 'On My Mac' in Mail.app
I have a mailbox (stored 'On My Mac') called Archive where I store all my read emails. I selected this mailbox and clicked 'Rebuild' in the Mailbox menu.
All my emails then disappeared.
I cannot find them anywhere on my hard drive. They also don't seem to have been backed up in my (twice weekly) Time Machine backups.
Any help you can give me will be hugely appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

Hi Washit,
you do see that the structure inside ~/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes/ is the same as the folders inside Apple Mail?
look for the same folder inside the Library where your email disapeard and your going to see a folder with a name like this D9260F12-B465-4B3C-BFEB-601A12FB012C.noindex edit the name of the folder by taking off .noindex you should have something like this D9260F12-B465-4B3C-BFEB-601A12FB012C after that rebuild the folder, if done right you will see all the email inside that folder.

Mac mail rebuild mailbox interruption

In an effort to integrate my emails from a previous installation into my current installation, I imported emails.
I then tried to rebuild the mail box in order to get the search to work properly.
Did not realize that I had run out of disk space, so I had to force quit, and then try again.
as a result, I have two "Data_Rebuild-n" folders along with my original "Data" folder.
What does the rebuild process do and in what sequence?
Is all my data spread over the three existing folders?
How can I recover and successfully rebuild (now that I have enough drive space)?
I search for answers, but have not been able to find an so far.
any suggestions?
Thanks, in advance.
J

The issue with g-mail became cronic. Now I can't delete e-mails received to my gmail account.
When I try to delete emails in the gMail or Mail inbox the following message is show.
The Message could not be removed to the mailbox (null)
The destination mailbox "(null)" does not allow messages to be moved to it.
This started after following the recomendation I found in the forum to sync gmail folders to the Mail - folders.
I am looking for solution to get back to the original condition that while not what it should be it is better than now.
Was hoping for solution were I wouldn't have to delete gmail account from mail then start again.
Any ideas welcome as I would like to delete emails in the gmail folders in Gmail without logging into Gmail every time.
Thank you

Email disappearing after rebuilding mailbox

I rebuilt a mailbox that had about 200 messages in it, and over 1/2 disappeared.
This was not because of upgrading from 10.3, I've been running 10.4 since it came out and have all the updates installed.
This is not one of my Inboxes, but a local mailbox that I created for sorting/storing messages.
I can go to Library->Mail->Mailbox->Messages folder and see all the messages there. If I double click one, I can view the message.
I've searched the forums here and tried the following that has been suggested for similar problems, but it hasn't worked:
1. Repair permissions w/ Disk Utility
2. Pull the mailbox itself to the desktop & import again (several times, after re-trying other points listed here).
3. Delete the Envelope Index & allow mail to import on it's own. (I didn't see an Envelope Journal).
4. View the permissions of a message in the folder that I can't import vs. one that I can view. They are exact.
5. Rebuild the mailbox from within mail.
The only thing I haven't done is completely reinstall Mail or delete the Library->Preferences->Mail plist. Mainly b/c I've got a lot of email addresses that I monitor, and that would be a major pain, that I don't want to undertake if there's any other option available.
What else do I need to try to get these messages back in?
Thanks!
Chris
Mac OS X (10.4.7)

OPEN LETTER TO THE MAIL 2.0 CODING TEAM. RSVP.
with thanks to DAVID GIMENO GOST, for answering so many people's posts about all the mail 2.0 bugs.
hi guys,
i love all things apple, and i have done for twenty years.
but with respect, your build of mail 2.0 really could be a lot better.
moving my mail from 1.0 on an ibook g3 running os X 10.3.9, over to mail 2.0 on an intel macbook 1.83 running os X 10.4.7 has been a nightmare.
the discussion boards of many mac sites feature countless cases of people making the move from 1.0 to 2.0, with all their e-mails disappearing.
having spent two weeks reading the knowledge forums, and learning about emailchemy, plus all the complications which, even with that third party program, still exist in moving one's mail over from version 1.0 over to 2.0, are both massive and horrendous.
and that's for me, who has twenty years of finding my way around mac bugs.
but this one is the most difficult i've ever seen, as well as being one of the most widespread problems in a FULL VERSION RELEASE of an apple program, which apple has done nothing to resolve during the six months in which this problem has been widespread in the mac community worldwide.
so thank god for DAVID GIMENO GOST !
i'm amazed that apple still hasn't come up with a patch for moving mail from 1.0 to 2.0.
even now, while i've finally got all my mail back today, 95% is showing as unread, due to the last obstacles in the process, which i can no longer face solving.
i've also lost hundreds of red mail flags during the transfer :o(.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, guys:
we shouldn't need to be buying third party software to move our e-mails from apple mail 1.0 up to apple mail 2.0, and even then be faced by massive hurdles to overcome, which take weeks for someone who at least has SOME idea of what he's doing.
i pity all the people who read the numerous forum posts about how difficult it is to transfer their mail from 1.0 to 2.0, and simply give up on the spot, and have to start their e-mail history TODAY, unable to access their previous e-mail again - potentially now for ever.
because the ironic joke is that we can't even have an access copy of mail 1.0 on our macs to read our old e-mails, unless we hack that program out of the 10.3 cd installation set, which the gurus on your own web site recommend us NOT to do !
so what are we supposed to do, to access our old e-mail, which we can't open, even though YES, it is in our mail folder, and YES, we did full rebuilds of every mail folder, and YES, we trashed our mail preferences first.
e-mail is now at the very center of the average mac user's digital life.
a user's most important program should not require countless hours scrolling through the astonishing number of problems within mail 2.0, which the apple.com discussion boards evidence, with new problems being added every day.
please sort this out, and build a patch, for the sanity of the many people who love apple, but who are unable to access any of their old e-mails.
because i wouldn't wish the last fortnight on anyone else.
RSVP, APPLE.
with best wishes to everyone on the infinity loop,
michael thorne
london, england
[email protected]
ps: if you're a mac user who has been affected by the mail 2.0 disappearing bug, please post a reply to this message, and send me an e-mail to: [email protected], so that we can draw apple's increasing attention to it. thanks.
MacBook1. 1.83 GHz. 512 MB. Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Messages disappeared after rebuilding mailbox in Apple Mail

I had a lot of messages in my mailbox (over 20,000). During rebuild of the inbox, the program froze after a while, so I had to force quit the application. Now all of my messages after June 2006 (about 17,000) are missing. Is there any way to get these messages back to my inbox?
I did backup of the whole system about a month ago, but I would like to resolve this somehow else as I received a lot of important stuff over last month.

First, in the Finder, open Home/Library/Mail/this mailbox (if the Inbox, then it will be in the account folder for that account, if an On My Mac mailbox you created it will be in the Mailboxes folder). Open this xxxx.mbox folder, find the Messages folder, open it, and report the number of files said to be in this Messages folder?
Are you sure it froze? How long did you wait? It is normal for all messages in the list of messages to temporarily disappear during Rebuild.
More info, please, including whether using POP, IMAP or .mac if this is the Inbox.
Ernie

Messages lost after rebuilding mailbox

Inbox had a message that said it was damaged --rebuilt as suggested and then each message in it said that it had not yet been downloaded from the server. Tried rebuilding it again and now all of the messages are gone. Then tried importing inbox.mbox which produced a selection of email that did not resemble the original inbox.
Are my original inbox messages retreivable?

No, it isn't clear. I still don't know what does "I attempted to import files from it (unsuccessfully)" mean, nor what does "I then tried to reconstruct the inbox from the mac back up" mean. These statements are too vague.
The only items within an *.mbox folder used by Mail 2.x are Info.plist and the Messages folder. Any other files you may see there are almost certainly Mail 1.x files that Mail 2.x leaves there after the conversion. This is poorly explained in Mac OS X 10.4 Mail: Some mailbox files used by Mac OS X 10.3 are not deleted after importing. The article only talks about mailboxes in ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/, but the same could also be said about mailboxes in any of the "POP-" account folders.
As long as you keep a backup copy of the old files for a while (at least, until you're sure everything was converted properly), they can safely be removed from the Mail folder. OnyX has a Cleaning > Misc Options > Temporary and obsolete items option for getting rid of all those files.
Note that if you see strangely-named Messages-T0x... folders, these aren't old files from previous versions of Mail, but rather an indication that there is something amiss. More specifically, these are temporary folders created by Mail 2.x during an import or a reindexing process (e.g. rebuilding a mailbox) that Mail should have deleted when done. Their presence is a clear indication that something didn't work as expected.
Importing a mailbox that still has the old files there would produce different results depending on how you try to import it. Importing it as Other, for example, would cause Mail to look at the old mbox file only, ignoring everything else, which almost certainly is not what you want.
In order to import the current mailbox contents, you must first move all the *.emlx files out of the Messages-T0x... folders and into Messages proper, then get rid of the (now empty) Messages-T0x... folders. In Mail, do File > Import Mailboxes, choose Mail for Mac OS X as the data format, and follow the instructions. Note that Mail wants you to select the folder that contains the mailbox to be imported, not the *.mbox folder itself.

Want to rebuild mailbox from client cache...how?

My System:
Xserve G5, 5GB RAM, 2 x 2Ghz Dual core xeons, Mac Os x Server 10.5.1 (build 9B18).
The Issue:
One of my users reported that he can't log in, For no apparent reason, the directory administrator was denied access to change the password, SO I deleted the user, re-created the same user with the same secondary mail partition (i am using a separate drive for the mail store location, the mail db as well as a secondary partition) All mail is stored on the secondary partition (/Volumes/mail/secondarypartition).
Now when the re-created user logged in, he couldn't see any of his previous mail. His mail store location was also wiped clean. He does have a cache on the lab machine. I have to reconstruct his old mailbox from his local cache on the lab machine... could any one guide me as to how I go about this?

I have a crude but effective solution after poking around at the contents of the mail cache. First of all make a backup of the IMAP folder (~/Library/Mail/IMAP-user@domain).
Then (with Mail off, although I don't think it makes any difference),copy the entire IMAP cache folder to the ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes folder which is the local mailbox store.
Then you need to rename all of the imapmbox folder to become plain old mbox folders. Pick your method as you see fit. I just did a:
find . | grep imapmbox$ > fixnames.sh
And then a couple of cleanup routines to produce the rename commands.
Once you have that, you can start Mail up and you'll see a new local folder containing your old IMAP hierarchy. But we're not there yet. You now need to go folder by folder and choose Mailbox > Rebuild on each one.
I did poke around in the Applescript dictionary but it would appear that's not a command exposed to the Applescript API (which is too bad since I have a lot of folders here...).
The last step would be copying all of that back up to the IMAP server.
Best of luck!

Rebuild mailbox, all mails gone...

One mailbox of mine showed only headers but no message in the body. So i tried to rebuild. Now all (but one) mails the inbox are gone. In the send box the header are there, the body messages not (don't think i will rebuild again..). And yes, i didn't backup lately....
So were can i find the lost messages (or does the system dispose of them immidiately when you hit "rebuild")

Rebuild does not dispose of messages. Did you wait patiently for Rebuild to finish, and wait until message list disappears before reappearing?
However, if the message bodies were already gone, then Rebuild would further remove the list messages.
In the Finder, open Home/Library/Mail -- if the mailbox rebuilt was the Inbox, then open the Account folder (likely a POP Account folder?), and further open the INBOX.mbox folder, and then further open the Messages folder within. How many xxxx.emlx files is the Messages folder reported to contain?
If the mailbox in question was one you created, then in the Mail folder, find and open the Mailboxes folder where that would reside, and make the same examination.
Ernie

Rebuild Mailboxes

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