Recovering deleted mail folders

I did a search about this topic and the threads had all been archived, meaning I could not post a reply. Sorry if this is redundant to some of you.
I had been manually sorting mail into folders based on senders. Today, I realized that I could use a Smart Mailbox to do automatically what I had been doing manually. I set up the Smart Mailboxes with the desired parameters, then deleted the folders into which I had been manually sorting the mail. I was horrified to discover that the Smart Mailbox did not recognize that mail - once I deleted the original folder, it was gone forever.
I've checked on the .Mac server for the deleted messages, but the folders there were deleted too. In an old thread about mail recovery, a user posted links to freeware on MacUpdate that would recover deleted mail, among other things. Unfortunately, both of the programs were demos; I would have to purchase the full program to recover my mail.
Is there a way to recover these messages? They were very important to me as many of them are from my fiancee.
Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Your problem occurred because "Smart Mailboxes" are saved searches, not real mailboxes, just like Smart Folders in Finder. So when you deleted the mailboxes, you deleted the actual message they contained, which is why the "Smart Mailboxes" could no longer find them.
Unfortunately, if they are not on the server, the only way to recover some of them is with an application that specializes in rescuing deleted files from the hard drive, since deleted files are not immediately overwritten but the drive space they use is simply marked as available for use for future writes.
Because of this, if you want to use one of these utilities, you must stop using the Mac immediately, since continued use will overwrite at least some of your missing message fragments.
There are no free utilities of this type. Balance the cost of one of them vs. the importance of recovering at least some of your messages & proceed from there.

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Recover deleted mail folders?

By accident, of course, I just deleted two folders from iMail. I haven't done anything yet--haven't closed the program--is there a way to recover these folders? Thanks for any help.

What is iMail?
Since it isn't possible to delete mailboxes with or from the iPhone's mail client, are you referring to the Mail application on your Mac?
If so, you posted this in the Mail, Contacts and Calendar discussions area for the iPhone.
Unless you maintain a regular backup, the deleted mailboxes are gone. You can try a data recovery utility, but you should shut down your Mac or use it as little as possible before using a data recovery utility. The more you use your Mac before doing so, the greater the chances the area on your computer's hard drive where this data was stored will be overwritten preventing or making recovery difficult by any means.

Is there a way to recover deleted mail from my iPad and recover deleted messages from my onw iPhone?

Is there a way to recover deleted mails sent from iPad and/or recover deleted messages from my iPhone?
A software or even open it? It is very important for me get back the messages sent on December. I did not have a back up at that time, at least that I know, but I change my iPhone and had as I got a micro chip, I could take my contacts from iTunes.
Does it means a back up was done at the Note book I used that time or the messages are lost?
And my mails? From my server, I can recover only from 5 last days!
Thank you for any help!!

Thanks for replying - no, I had not done a backup since the shots were taken and then attemped to put them in an album as I did not want to change the enviornment of the phone from when I had inadvertently delted them. Unfortunatlely, when asked "Do you want to delete these photos from all locations," I hit yes and they were also deleted from my Photostream.

Recover deleted mails

Hi all,
I have problems to recover deleted mails on OCS. I have my DB on archive mode, I configure OCS to use Flashback Mail recovery, now i configure to use LogMiner to recover emails.
The results is, now i can recover deleted mails from outlook, but not from the email Administrator page. When i tried it, I can see the deleted mails, i can selected the emails to recover, but when i click on the recover button, the program try to recover and display next message: "Error, None of the e-mails were recovered"
Could somebody help me?
Thanks in advance,
Nacho

just start TM from mail, scroll back in time in the mail window, locate the email in question and hit "restore". it will be restored to a separate mailbox in "on my mac" section. you can move it to the desired location from there.

Deleting Mail Folders in Time Machine

I want to delete all time machine back up files certain selected mail folders and emails. How do I do that?
If I open mail in the finder, then enter time machine, the mail folders in a mail window appears in time machine but the action menu in the bottom left hand corner of the mail window is greyed out and unusable.
If I simple enter time machine without previously opening mail in my finder I get a finder in time machine. Then if I select applications/mail I do get an working action menu with the choice 'delete all backups of mail'. But I only want to delete all backups of certain mail folders and messages leaving others untouched, is this possible?

It is possible but it's very tricky, since you have to navigate your way round the library folders and it's easy to delete the wrong file. In general, you have to navigate to Library/Mail, then into the folder for your mail account, then the folder for the INBOX, then Messages, then find the message you want to delete.
Bob

How to recover deleted mail/mailbox?

While trying to solve a problem I had with a mailbox in Mac Mail, I deleted the mailbox. I only took the precaution to save the Inbox in a different location but not the Sent mail. Big mistake. After deleting the mailbox I found out that it also deleted all the mails in the Sent folder, some of which are very important to me.
I looked for suggestions in the Apple Support Communities and found what seemed to be the answer to my problem: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/613328?start=0&tstart=0
This is what I did as Geoffrey Charters suggested:
Step 1: Download FileSalvage (https://secure.subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/Undelete/DataRecovery/FileSalvage) and run it in demo mode. In this mode, you can only explore, which is OK. Set the "free space only" option and start the scan. It takes a while. You should see your deleted .emlx files in the resulting list. Select one and make sure the preview pane contains email headers. That way you'll know you are in good shape. If so...
Step 2: Buy a registration code for FileSalvage, and use the "Register" menu item in FileSalvage to enable the full version.
Step 3: Select all the batches of 100 .emlx file that have been found and restore them to your second disk drive.
And then as David Gimeno Gost suggested:
1. Create a folder on the Desktop and name it however you want, but give it an .mbox suffix, e.g. Recovered.mbox
2. Within that folder, create a folder named Messages (with no suffix), and move the messages to be imported into this folder.
3. 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 *.mbox folders to be imported (i.e. the Desktop in this case), not the *.mbox folders themselves.
After running FileSalvage for 4 days that it took to scan all my drive byte by byte, it found the files I needed and I could even preview parts of the messages I was looking for. Everything looked promissing. I recovered such files and stored them in a secondary drive.
This is where the new problem starts. All the retreived files are stored in the secondary drive but when I try to preview any of them using Finder, just a blank page opens. I also tried importing them to Mail as David Gimeno suggested but, although an imported mailbox was created, all the messages there are blank. I can even see in the size column in Mail that every message is 0 bytes.
I know that somehow the information that I need is stored in the files I recovered with FileSalvage, because when I browse through such files using Finder, I can see that they have different sizes. So, the information must be there, I just don't know how to access it.
Has anybody had this problem? Any suggestions?

Appart from solving with a backup, do you know any other way I could get my information back, according to the description I made?

Recover delete mails in icloud

i have delete my mails in icloud.
How ca i recover them?

Look in the trash folder. They should be there.

Can Not Delete Mail Folders

Hi
I have a number of folders on an IMAP account. When I ctrl click them (one at a time) and choose delete mailbox I get an error message -
The IMAP command “DELETE” failed with server error: Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for more information. [2008-11-01 12:50:10].
When I log on to the account in question via browser the folders have gone but I can't get rid of them in Mail and I don't understand why.
I have deleted all the messages that were left in the folders and then tried to delete the folder but that doesn't do it. I have also gone into my home older > library > mail > IMAP account name foler and deleted the files in there with the same names as the folders I want to get rid of but when I restart Mail they reappear and so do the files in the library > mail folder.
Any advice appreciated.
Regards
David
PS For what it's worth, the first time I attempted to delete a folder from the this IMAP account it worked fine but for some reason since then I have the issue described above.

Hi Dave,
That is strange. Since the folders are indeed deleted on the server, and you're using IMAP, consider making a second similar account within Mail.app->Preferences->Accounts and let it sync all messages and folders with the server. If it succeeds and you're satisfied, remove the original email account from the Preferences->Accounts section and hope the folder-deletion-problem doesn't return.

Recovering deleted mail

I have an iBook 64 10.4.11. I use the mail feature for my gmail account. I recently realized that when I delete my mail it doesn't just delete, it goes somewhere in my computer, I found this out by using spotlight and searching for things, because it would show messages from up to a year ago. I was wondering if there was a folder that just had every email I have ever had since I opened the mail feature, and how would I find it? I am trying to find an email from the beginning of this year and I don't know how to do it. Thanks! (sorry if I explained this poorly, this is the second time I have posted on here)

I deleted an account name by mistake and lost all the mail. I recovered it with Data Rescue after following another threads instructions, but....
I have a list of files called mail1.mbox, mail2.mbox etc that I can open in Text and see the raw messages, but can't seem to import them into mail. Importing Mail for Mac OSX creates a blue Import folder on the side bar with nothing in it.
Can anyone help?

I cannot delete mail folders from any of my accounts

I Have just updated my iPad to iOS 8 and now I cannot delete any of the folders that are in my mail boxes. Every time I hit the delete button in edit mode the iPad just bounces back to ipad home page.

Swiping works to delete e-mails in a folder but does not delete an e-mail folder. I have tried the edit folders then clicking on delete and again it just flashes back to the iPads home page. It worked before I did the update to iOS 8 so must be a programming glitch.

How to recover deleted mail.

I accidentally deleted the contents of my "sent" mail.
How to I restore this?
By the way, I back up my iMac to an external firewire drive each week,
so I really just need to know which files to replace (I guess?).

How is it backed up? A complete backup?
You should be able to use Mail's Import function, Mail>File>Import Mailboxes...>Mail for OSX, then navigate to the top Mail folder in the backup...
Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail
Choose that whole Mail foder, after a bit it'll show you the choices of Boxes to Import, Choose Sent, it'll import into a boc named Import, which then you can highlight all the eMails & move them to your Inbox.

Restoring Mail folders?

I accidentally deleted a mail folder within Apple Mail and I was hoping someone could shed some light on possibly restoring deleted mail folders.
Thanks!

Messages deleted as a result of deleting the mailbox that contained them don't go anywhere, not even to the Trash. Rather, they are permanently removed from the filesystem.
If the messages are from a POP account configured to leave mail on the server for some time and they are still on the server, there is a way to tell Mail to download them again. You can use webmail (if the account allows web access) or the Account Info window to check whether the messages are still on the server. To open the Account Info window, choose Get Info (⌘I) from the Action menu (gear icon) located below the mailboxes list in the main Mail window.
If the messages are not on the server and you don’t have a backup, your only option in the case of Mail 2.x is to try to salvage as many deleted *.emlx files as possible with a data recovery tool such as Data Rescue II, TechTool Pro, or FileSalvage (the files to be recovered would be different in the case of Mail 1.x). Of these, the only one I know for sure that can currently recover deleted *.emlx files is FileSalvage. Stop using your computer right now if you want to try that, as anything you do with the computer may cause the deleted files to be overwritten.

HELP - Lost Mail Folders - Any way to recover?

All of my custom email folders have disappeared. This is tragic, as my last backup was several months ago (yes yes... I know this is my own fault). After reading around online here, I see that the Preferences file can get corrupted if hard drive space is low. I am guessing that this is my problem, since I had Photoshop running at the same time, and only 6gig free on my 80gig drive, and remember a pop-up window appearing in Photoshop saying that my hard drive space was low.
This being the case -- just because a preference file gets deleted/messed-up, does this mean that there is NO way to recover those messages? What happened to those original files of mine that held those messages? I must have had 30 folders, and all of them are zapped from my hard drive? Not in the trash, not in the POP folders in my Library, not anywhere when I do a Find for their name. I just don't understand how they could disappear completely, and isn't there a chance that there is some recoverable data somewhere on my drive??
I also don't understand why my Junk Mail, Sent Mail and InBox mail was NOT deleted. Only the folders that I had created to file my messages. And I didn't have to re-setup my accounts or do anything like that.
Thanks in advance for any advice that anybody might be able to share.
G4 Titanium Powerbook Mac OS X (10.4.4) Mail 2.0.5

Hi all. I sure appreciate everybody's suggestions and feedback. Even though ultimately things have not worked out for me, I have a renewed faith in the Apple community as a whole -- which counts for something.
I'll try to sum up what happened for me. First, my mail folders/mbox files were nowhere to be found on my computer (either by looking in that specific heirarchy or by doing a Find for their names). Also, I did not delete any accounts at the time of the problem. I DID delete a folder from within Mail that showed up at the top of my Mail list, named "/" and which contained a single folder named "library" (I think?) which contained a single folder named "mail" or something to that effect. Basically, several folders nested within each other, with the bottom folder being caled "INBOX" (written like that) and containing mail that I had not seen before. I selected all, dragged it to my real InBox, and then deleted the top-level folder from Mail's list (named "/"). It was shortly thereafter that I lost all of my mail folders. I've never seen a mailbox folder just add itself to the list like that -- has anybody else? And then combine that with the fact that I was running a huge Photoshop file and had maxed out my hard drive's empty space as PS used it up for memory... So basically it evidently all set up a situation that caused corruption on a huge level, and caused me to lose every custom mailbox that I had defined, but not my InBox, Drafts, Sent Mail or Junk. (Luckily my Junk mail was saved, eh? How lucky for me. ha ha)
With the advice of folks here and at the Apple store and on the phone with data-saving software reps, I tried Disk Utility to first repair permissions and then fix the disk. It did find a few things on both tests, and I did repair them -- but Mail still wouldn't pull up those folders. I also ran TechTool and Data Rescue II on my drive (TAKING HOURS AND HOURS) -- but no luck.
Nobody ever seemed to think I would have much luck, but I had to give it a shot, since losing all of that mail was going to be hard for me.
And so this afternoon, I have come to the conclusion that my situation is hopeless, and I need to get back the use of my Powerbook (I have huge deadlines that I'm really behind on now, because of all of this down-time having software check my drive).
The lesson here, boys and girls, is to not take lightly the significance of hard drive space -- and to not only backup your most important files (like I did)... but to also back up your mail folder regularly... as well as any other quirky little things that might not seem obvious, but which if were eliminated from your life, would make you sad.
So thanks again to all who posted their suggestions -- it was worth my effort to give everything a shot, even though unfortunately there was not a happy ending.

I clicked to open one of my mail folders and when it opened, it immediately deleted all of the items in it! Why and can I get them back???

In my email app, I clicked to open one of my mail folders. When it opened, it immediately deleted all of the emails inside that folder. This happened with all the others too. How can I stop this and is it possible to get that mail back.

Did you try to open teh fle by double-clicking its icon? If the file was made with an older version of Office, you may get that message. Try opeing PP and, from its "File" menu, see if you can open the ppt. I've foundthat often gets around that message and then yo ucan save the file from the newer version.
If that doesn't work, consider asking in the Microsoft Office: Mac forums here:
Office for Mac forums
PowerPoint is not an Apple product and it seems a lot of people around here avoid Office.

How can I recover deleted folders - also - question about editing/deleting msf files

Context: My wife accidentally deleted a series of folders from Thunderbird v.24.6.0
She says that the system warned her that there was "not enough space" or something like that (she doesn't remember clearly) and asked her if she wanted to "delete them permanently" (or something like that), but she pressed "yes" anyway. She then freaked out, and when I came in to see what she was screaming and crying about, she told me the above story.
SO, after spending the last 2-3 hours reading through help articles and finding my local Mail file/structure, learning about Mork and msf and compacting and X-Mozilla-Status codes, downloading Notepad++ and poking around through some of the files to familiarize myself with their format ... here I am trying to learn how to restore the folders.
Here is where I am at so far:
1. When I went to the Activity Manager, it shows the folders that were deleted, one below the others in a list with the title "Deleted folder foldername" with a dozen different folder names.
2. When I look for the one of the folders that was deleted in the Mail/path/foldername" - I open it (the one without the file extension) in notepad++ and it is empty. There only exists line 1 and there is no text in it (vs. the other folders I check that have the emails in standard From_line format.
This concerns me greatly and leaves me stuck. Did TB actually delete and compact the folder? Are they really deleted, not just X-Mozilla-Status deleted?
3. I don't understand how to restore a folder. I know I can go into a folder and change the X-Mozilla-Status for individual messages - but how to I restore the entire folder? I don't understand how the msf related to the deleted files/folders. It seems like there would be an entry/code somewhere that tells TB - "don't read this entire folder" that I could reverse/edit. I can't figure it out on my own.
4. I understand that, if I delete the foldername.msf file, TB will compact the foldername file. I think I should NOT do this because it will permanently delete the files I want to restore - right?
Any help would be appreciated. I have an unhappy wife. Thank you.

The message she garbled I would assume is that the deletions were to large and that the deleted folder would be bypassed. So all the normal recovery from the trash is simply not possible. There is no Thunderbird magic available unfortunately. So your reduced to using operating system undelete software. I have no idea how that will go, but I just downloaded this http://ntfsundelete.com/download and it does appears to do the job, even if the close text is so pale as to be hard to see.

Recovering deleted mail folders

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