Recovering a mailbox from Time Machine?

So I wanted to archive an imap mailbox. It wasn't working, so I tried other things that resulted in everything being lost (completely my fault).
I found the ".imapmbox" file in /Library/IMAP-imapaccountname. I recovered it, and now this folder is back where it was originally. (Obviously, the messages are no longer on the imap account; they only exist in this local folder now.) All I want is this folder to be archived and able to be browsed in Mail like my other archives.
I tried simply moving the .imapmbox folder to the /Library/Mailboxes/Archive folder and changing the extension to just .mbox like the other archives, but this did not work. Maybe I have to change more than just the extension...
The mailbox folder in question is now viewable under the "ON MY MAC" heading on the left side of Mail just like my other archived mailboxes. However, the messages do not show up when I select it. Does anyone know how to fix this mess I have made??? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Hello
I have similar problem that I would like to ask for your advice.
I would like to restore my sent mail in gmail through "sentmail.imapmbox" from a folder in the library in Time machine.
I tried to import it, to replace the new one in the same place, and it all failed.
The click and drag way you mentioned, did you succeed recover from the *.imapmbox?
It would be nice if you can share your experience. Thanks

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Recovering mail folder from TIME MACHINE

I've recovered a folder from Time Machine, but I can't seem to get it to go into my mail program.
I've just looked inside the folder, though, and some of the messages seem to be blank.
I have created a new folder and have tried to migrate over just ten of these messages. It won't even do that. I've started over again by deleting the folder and re-creating a new one. And I've restarted my computer. There's something really wrong here.
It may also have to do with a .mac synch. I get a flashed message that says "outgoing 3974 message" (which is how many I have, or thereabouts). But it doesn't process anything, just says that and goes away.
Any ideas here???

I've just looked into my library / preferences folder, and there does not appear to be a plist for Mail there. Isn't that odd? Where should that plist be located, and what would it mean if none is appearing? I've never heard of that one, is there a fix for such a problem (if it is the source of my problem?).

OS 10.5.8 Leopard. Recovering old data from Time Machine after HD replacement.

Okay, I have and iMac dual core Model A1224, EMC 2210, 20" screen, 2.66GHz processor, 2GB RAM, came, when I bought it, with a 500 GB drive circa late 2008. The drive started to fail about 2 weeks ago, random shut downs, wouldn't boot up, couldn't find the OS. Could sometime recover booting up from the original OS disk in the C drive, but eventually even that failed. Had run disk first aid and TechTool Pro6 to no avail, they all passed the drive so it was a mechanical failure,not bad sectors.
REPLACED the drive with a brand new Seagate Barracuda 1TB drive, figured I was all set, Time Machine had backed up the old drive every day since 2009 to an external 1TB drive. I could even see the data there. Now new drive is installed and I need to load the OS to it and retrieve my data from Time Machine. Put in the old disk, Leopard 10.5.1, and walked along and asked it to bring in the data from Time Machine.... except, the data is saved on Time Machine in a new version of Leopard, ver. 10.5.8 and so the 10.5.1 version can't import it, but of course Migration Assistant will allow you to import it later.
So, I continue to load the OS via the disk, then go to software update after creating a new computer name, which I didn't want to do. Updated the software so I am now running OS 10.5.8, open Migration Assistant and attempt to migrate / recover the old data from Time Machine. I can get some stuff, but it insists on my resetting everything up all over again, all new accounts in Quicken and Thunderbird and Microsoft Office, no recovery of data already there and I can't access the accounts that were set up by others, it indicates I don't have sufficient privileges though I was an Administrator on the old computer and on the current system as well.
Frankly, I need that old data, so how do I get it? Do I bite the bullet and upgrade the system to Snow Leopard OS10.6.XX, will that allow me access to old data under OS 10.5.8? Will it be backwards compatible? How about moving up to Lion? Would that be a better way to go and will I be able to recover that old data then?
VERY frustrated here! Thanks for help or direction you all can provide.

HI,
Have you looked through Pondini's extensive TM help site?
http://Pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html
http://pondini.org/TM/Troubleshooting.html
Can't imagine what he hasn't covered!

How do I recover ical data from time machine

I lost all my data of Calendar from iCal. Try to recovered from Time Machine, but couldn't find the folder call "Calendars".
Can anyone help, please please

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4182934

Emails in restored mailbox from Time Machine are not visible

I have an IMAC 5.1 with OSX 10.6.8. When I restored a mailbox using Time Machine, the mailbox appears in Apple Mail however no emails are visible even though they are present in the folder in library/mail/mailboxes in Finder. Any suggestions on how I can make the emails visible?
Thanks

I managed to find the solution. In Mail under Mailbox in the header there is a Rebuild button. I pressed it and my emails are now visible.

How do I restore iCloud mailboxes from Time Machine without losing new mail?

This morning when I opened my laptop and checked my email, Apple Mail decided to flag every single email in my three separate Apple-related accounts ([email protected],[email protected], and [email protected])—some 14,500+ emails total. None of the emails in my comcast or yahoo accounts were affected. Of course, each of the three accounts is set to download copies to my laptop as well as keep them on the server, so now all of those emails are flagged across the board—on my iMac, my iPhone, my iPad mini as well as my laptop. Yay. Since some of the emails were actually flagged intentionally by me over time, I don't want to just unflag everything or I'll lose my flags as well as the ones spontaneously generated this morning.
My questions are:
1) If I use a Time Machine backup from last night to restore the three affected mailboxes, will iCloud accept them as the de facto most up-to-date versions, or do I still have to go through some complicated process in order to convince the cloud that the 14,500+ unflagged emails don't then need to be "updated" to flagged status?
2) More importantly, will the cloud still sync properly so that I still get all of the emails that came since last night? I'm fine if the absence of the more recent emails from the "new" (actually older TM) mailboxes is interpreted as though they've been deleted, since my preferences are set to keep deleted email on the server for a month. But it would be a problem if those emails simply disappear into the ether.
3) Does anyone have any idea what might have caused the random flagging in the first place and/or suggestions for keeping it from happening in the future?
I remember vaguely that in the early days of Time Machine, restoring iCloud mailboxes was a complicated process in order to trick the cloud into accepting the Time Machine backup as the latest and greatest version. I take it that's no longer such a tricky proposition nowadays, since a search of Apple's knowledge base yielded little information on it. I'd appreciate some confirmation on that, however, so I know what to expect after the restore.
Thanks!
I'm going to try cross-posting this issue in both the iCloud and Time Machine forums since it's some of both. Apologies in advance if that causes confusion.

I set up an admin account for myself, logged on to it, and then followed the procedure in the help file to delete his account, saving it as a .dmg file. Then, when he asked for his old emails, I followed the procedure in the help file to restore a deleted user account and copied the contents of the .dmg into it.
I'm not entirely confident I got the restoration sequence right, since I find the order of steps in the help file confusing. But everything except the Mail data seems to be recovered.
Another source of trouble may be the email account settings: when I opened Mail under his log-on, there were no accounts set up: I recreated them using his email address and password, but Mail may well be treating these as new accounts, rather than re-opened old accounts.
Thanks, John

Recovering Sent Mail from Time Machine

How do I recover all my Gmail Sent Mail from my last Time Machine backup? Accidentally deleted them from Apple Mail, & being IMAP, they've gone from the Gmail server too. I don't need anything but the Sent Messages (14,000 of them over the last 8 years), have all the Received still, and my mac.com mail account is also still intact. I just need to recover, specifically, all my Sent Mail messages sent on gmail. Thanks for any input - and as you can imagine, I'm rather desperate!

Thanks for this, Eric. When you say do a backup, you mean do a new backup? using Time Machine? - of the current contents of my laptop? Which will include my almost empty Gmail Sent Messages mailbox.
At the moment (pre-new backup) there is no AoisIMAP item in my Library/Mail/V2 folder - what there is, in terms of Gmail, is:
Library/Mail/V2/[email protected]/Sent Mail.mbox and also Library/Mail/V2/[email protected]/Sent Messages.mbox. Are you saying that when I do my new backup, I'll get a new folder in V2 called AoisIMPA/Sent Messages.mbox?
And then, going into my Time Machine, do I go to the last backup I did before the new one (August 16) or do I go into the new backup which I'll have just made?
Thanks so much for helping me with these questions, Eric!
One more weird thing, on my Time Machine backups of my current laptop (an 11" Air), which I've had about 9 months (and last backed up 8/16, that's about 3 weeks before I accidentally deleted my Gmail Sent Messages), NONE of my Sent Gmails are showing in any of the backups I did for it (about 12 over the 9 months), although all the mail, sent or received, on my mac.com and aol.com accounts have been backed and are showing.
On my other Air (13") which I've had a couple of years, my Time Machine backups show my Gmail Sent Messages up to October 30, 2013 but then in every subsequent back up, the Gmail Sent Messages folder is also empty! (Mac.com & aol.com folders are all showing all their mail, throughout all the backups).
Any explanation on that? Did something happen between Apple & Google?
Thanks again, looking forward to more advice and information.
Vikramjnt x

How to retrieve accidentally deleted mailboxes from Time Machine?

I recently did a reinstall and, winding up with two Mail programs, trashed the one I was "sure" was the new, bogus one. Unfortunately, it was my original Mail program, including the mailboxes with letters from Swedish relatives, important addresses, etc. Going back into Time Machine I found strange-looking references to the boxes but couldn't figure out out to make any of it readable. I've come across advertisements for Disk Warrior, Tech Tool, and several other programs, and came close to buying them all at once before cooling down a bit. Any suggestions about avenues worth pursuing would be appreciated. (Or even if it's likely to be a lost cause.)
Cap

There's the Mail program and there are stored 'mailboxes' with the data in them. Deleting a version of the Mail program shouldn't affect the latter. If that's all you've done then your mail data should be where it has always been. My guess (and I'm not an expert in Mail) is that you have ended up with a different version of Mail to the one you've been using and it doesn't store its mailboxes in the same way so isn't finding your data. I would suggest asking the question of the Mail forum and give them the version number of the Mail program you have and any info you have about the version you deleted.

HT201250 Can I recover the backups from Time Machine, but the backups is deleted by the Time Machine!

Unfortunately, the Time Macchine deleted my oldest backups in my hard drive.
I have the important files in the backups.
So hope someone could help me to recover the backups.

Time Machine will remove old backups automatically. It tells you when it does, but of course by then it's too late.
There is no recovering deleted backups, since it was necessary to overwrite them with newer backups.
For further explanation read the following entries from Apple Support Communities contributor Pondini's Time Machine FAQ:
12. Should I delete old backups? If so, How?
20. Once my Mac is backed-up, can I delete some stuff to save space?
Time Machine is for backups. It is not an archiving utility. To archive files requires something like one of these:
Carbon Copy Cloner ($39.95) http://sites.fastspring.com/bombich/product/ccc
or
SuperDuper! ($27.95) http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Error 36 when trying to recover iphoto library from time machine back up

When I try to recover a backup of an iPhoto library from my Time Capsule using TimeMachine, I receive the following error code: "The Finder can’t complete the operation because some data in “iPhoto Library” can’t be read or written. (Error code -36)." I have read a post regarding Snow Leopard 10.6.6 being the issue. Has anyone else had experience of this and if so how did you reslove this.

Hi, and welcome to the forums.
Connect to the TC via Ethernet cable if at all possible.
Try repairing your backups, per #A5 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

Clean install of Mt. Lion and i cant recover any files from time machine

I did a clean install erasing my hard drive. I have been running time machine to a time capsule for the last 3 years. I tried migration, it wont bring anything over. I tried opening mail then opening time machine and finding a back up point, it wont let me restore. Does anything on a mac ever work. I have been using this thing for 4 years and its always a major ordeal to get anything to do what it is supposed to. I need my old inbox as well as sent emails and have no way to recover them.
Before i did this whole install I backed up the mbox files individually on a usb drive. I can recover the inbox but if i import the sent files, they all have me as the recipient.
HELP

Have a look here > http://pondini.org/TM/14.html
From Pondinis Excellent Information on TM > http://pondini.org/TM/FAQ.html

How to recover RSS feeds from Time Machine backup?

Hi,
I have deleted an RSS feed and so even his messages are gone. Then I have tried to recover it from my TM backup but I just discovered that TM shows me the RSS feed but it does not allow me to select them to recover.
Is it correct?
Is there any way to recover that?
thanks!

Thanks for the response BDAqua, I did use Migration Assistant to transfer her data from the SuperDuper backup. Are you suggesting that I use Migration Assistant to transfer data from the Time Machine backup? Will that result in duplication? Sorry, but I've no experience at all with Time Machine backups and don't know whether you can 'pick and choose' what to restore from the Time Machine using Migration Assistant.
Cheers
Tricia

Cannot restore a mailbox from Time Machine

On the recent Yosemithe I cannot restore a mailbox from my Time Machine backup. I proceed exactly as described in the Mail (Yosemite): Restore mailboxes and their content article. However, nothing happens after the process window completes. The restored content does not appear anywhere.
Any ideas?

Although you can restore messages from a Time Machine snapshot within the Mail application, it generally won't work with messages that were saved by an obsolete version of Mail. In that case, you have to use an alternative method.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
~/Library/Mail/V2
Right-click or control-click the highlighted line and select
          Services ▹ Open
from the contextual menu.* A folder should open. Inside it are subfolders representing your Mail accounts. The names refer to the email addresses you use.
Enter Time Machine and scroll back to the snapshot you want. Select the account folders you want and then select Restore ... to... from the action menu (gear icon) in the toolbar of the snapshot window. Restore the folders to the Desktop, not to their original location.
From the Mail menu bar, select
          File ▹ Import Mailboxes...
Choose Apple Mail as the format and import from the mailboxes in the folders you restored to the Desktop. The imported messages will appear in a new mailbox. Move the ones you want to keep wherever you like and delete the rest. Then delete the folders on the Desktop.
*If you don't see the contextual menu item, copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. In the Finder, select
          Go ▹ Go to Folder...
from the menu bar and paste into the box that opens by pressing command-V. You won't see what you pasted because a line break is included. Press return.

Restoring deleted Mailbox from Time Machine

As my I just changed servers for my domain (and emails) I needed to create a new account.
Before realising what was happening - I had lost whole inbox and sent items (over 1400 emails!).
After the first panic - I though everything's fine: lets just restore from the Time Machine back up.
In Time Machine, I navigated to time showing the 'old Inbox' and clicked restore. Despite apparent window showing the restore in progress, nothing happens and no emails are to be found in any new mailbox or folder anywhere within Mail. After several desperate attempts - the over 800 inbox emails suddenly appear like magic on Mail and I am able to transfer them to the 'new Inbox'. Could have danced around the office..!
Now trying the same strange process with the Sent Items. Again the same problem but this time no matter how many times it keeps telling me it's been done - not a single restored email appears in Mail. Not even when as a test I try to restore only one email.
What on EARTH is going on.
Could someone smarter than me please help how I could get past this problem. All help GREATLY appreciated!

Did this solve your problem? I have the same problem and rebuilding the inbox pulls emails from the server again, but the problem is (like you mentioned) that the server is also empty and thus the inbox will be empty as a result of IMAP syncing after a rebuild command. I have tried everything, even restoring the entire mail folder and preferences files from a backup with no results!

Recovering an application from time machine

Hi
I inadvertantly deleted an apllication. I have kept my time machines backups up-to-date. How do I recover the application?

Open Time Machine from the dock on your Mac and wait a few minutes for the Time Machine "Star Wars" interface to load
Using the scale at the far right of the screen, locate a date when the application was still on your Mac
Click on the date and Time Machine will display it at the bottom of the window to confirm
Click on Applications on the left side of the Finder window
Locate the application that you want and click on it to highlight it
Click Restore at the lower right of the window

Recovering a mailbox from Time Machine?

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