Help Needed with Mail

On Feb 1, 2010, at 6:30 AM, Frank McBride wrote:

> I am at wit's end trying to resolve a problem with Mail. I am
> running Mail version 3.6 (936) on my G5 iMac running OS X 10.5.8.
> Last week all of our email in both the Inbox and archived in "On My
> Mac" disappeared.

For mail stored on your Mac should be stored in ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/mailbox_name.mbox/Messages where ~ represents your home folder and mailbox_name is the name of the a specific mail folder. POP mailbox folders are stored as ~/Library/Mail/POP-accountname/mailbox_name.mbox. It's possible that all you have lost are the indexes. Since Mail is apparently displaying a list of Mailboxes (folders), you should click on each one individually and select Mailbox->Rebuild (the last item) from the menu list at the top of the screen. That should rebuild the index for that mailbox. Unfortunately, you need to do this for each mailbox individually.


Alan Forkosh Oakland, CA
aforkoshmac.com

On 01Feb2010, at 06:30, Frank McBride wrote:

> I am at wit's end trying to resolve a problem with Mail. I am
> running Mail version 3.6 (936) on my G5 iMac running OS X 10.5.8.
> Last week all of our email in both the Inbox and archived in "On My
> Mac" disappeared. This represents thousands of emails. My wife had

[home]/library/Mail/Mailboxes/*

Are you using POP or IMAP? If the latter, the problem might be with your server, not your local copy of Mail (though of course that shouldn't effect your "on my Mac" mailboxes).

--Ron

Your mail lives in ~/LIbrary/Mail . . .and is very likely still there. Sometimes the index gets corrupted . . .try selecting the mailbox and then Mailbox -> Rebuild. If that doesn't work . . .try the envelope rebuild trick from http://www.tuaw.com/2006/04/12/mail-slowing-you-down-rebuild-its-database/. There's also a freeware app named VacuumMail that does the same thing . . .http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/24410.

neil

On 2/1/10 at 6:30 AM, fmcbroadrunner.com (Frank McBride) wrote:

>I am at wit's end trying to resolve a problem with Mail. I am
>running Mail version 3.6 (936) on my G5 iMac running OS X 10.5.8.
>Last week all of our email in both the Inbox and archived in "On My
>Mac" disappeared. This represents thousands of emails. My wife had
>tried rebooting the computer to see if the problem would clear up,
>but all mail was still gone, even though all of our folders were
>still present. The email inbox immediately start to receive new
>email that has continued since then (three days).

>I have tried to locate a file on my hard drive where the mail might
>be stored to see if it had really disappeared, but could not locate
>such a file. I looked on my external hard drive where back-up files
>are kept, but no luck there either. I was hoping I could somehow
>reconnect my Mail application with my stored email.

>Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!!

Recently, my wife has had a problem with Mail where it displayed
a dialog on launch saying there was insufficient space in her
home directory and offering no real solution. The only button
clickable in this dialog was a Quit button. So, while email
messages where not gone, they also could not be read by mail. In
the process of fixing this problem, I found the following:

In the directory ~/Library is a subdirectory named Mail. Inside
this are several files and subdirectories. Drilling down through
the various subdirectories of the directory ~/Library/Mail I
found subdirectories named Messages.

Inside the messages subdirectories were many files files named
with a number and the extension .emix. Opening several of these
in a text editor showed them to be individual email messages.
But I've not found a way to get Mail to reconnect with these
files if the entire directory ~/Library/Mail is replaced with a backup.

Tonight I was able to fix my wife`s email problem by deleting
one file "Envelope Index". On launch Mail displayed a dialog
saying it needed to re-import email messages with a button
allowing continuation. Clicking on this button caused Mail to do
some work and seems to have restored all of my wife's email as
unread email.

All of the above was done using Finder while Mail was not
running. I've no idea how much this will help you. I do suggest
before playing with the files in the directory ~/Library/Mail
using other software you first copy this file somewhere safe so
as to be able to restore things back to the way you have found
them. There is always risk of data loss or other problems when
you manipulate a program's files behind its back with other software.

I'm not sure where your mail disappeared, but if you have TimeMachine
backing up your Mac, open up Mail, and then go into TImeMachine, you
can go through your mail folder just like you can in your Finder.
There's a good chance your mail can be located there.

Mail in the Mac is stored in the user's Library folder under
~/Library/Mail. Each account will have a folder under that folder, and
inside each are folders representing the folders inside each account.
Each email message is stored as an individual file. This was done for
TimeMachine in order to minimize storage. Before, each folder
contained all the message in one long file which is the standard way
Unix did it.

Hope this helps.

--
David Weintraub
qazwartgmail.com

On 2/02/2010, at 21:41, David Weintraub <qazwartgmail.com> wrote:

> Each email message is stored as an individual file. This was done for
> TimeMachine in order to minimize storage. Before, each folder
> contained all the message in one long file which is the standard way
> Unix did it.

Actually it was implemented in 10.4 for Spotlight but has worked out
rather well for Time Machine (which debuted in 10.5)

Cheers

        Thanks to Alan Forkosh, Neil Laubenthal, Ron Risley, Bill Rowe and
David Weintraub for their detailed assistance. All mail, both
archived and on the server have been restored via the rebuild
function. I was also able to successfully locate to where the email
was stored due to their valuable information.

        Thanks Again,

        Frank McBride

On Feb 3, 2010, at 4:09 PM, Frank McBride wrote:

> Thanks to Alan Forkosh, Neil Laubenthal, Ron Risley, Bill Rowe and
> David Weintraub for their detailed assistance. All mail, both
> archived and on the server have been restored via the rebuild
> function. I was also able to successfully locate to where the email
> was stored due to their valuable information.

No problem . . .we were all less knowledgeable at one time . . .glad to have easily solved the issue.

neil