Accident! Deleted drafts.....where r they??

cheeryble said:

Hi there please can u help?

I went to add to a long email I had saved in drafts.
Not sure what I did but think I tried to edit a draft without "forwarding" and pressed delete a couple of times.
What seems to have happened is that draft and another I had put a lot of work into have disappeared. I was horrified to see they're not in trash.

Surely it's not so easy to make this mistake?
Can I find my drafts anywhere?

Pleeeaase!

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If you are using an email provider that offers a web mail access, go to the web mail access and see if anything is in the trash folder. For instance, in gmail I had to go really digging for my trash folder because I have so many labels it was only visible if I picked "more" at the bottom of my list of labels. When I picked "less" again my trash folder went away.

cheeryble said:

I indeed went to gmail on the web...but it shows exactly the same as in MAIL (yes, forgot to say I was in MAIL for the problem).....the drafts are gone and nothing in what gmail calls "deleted messages"

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Then that as they say is that. One thing that might be worth a try is restoring from a Time Machine backup from before you deleted the drafts. The problem is that with IMAP, there is a "race condition" between gmail and mail.app over whether to upload the deleted drafts or to delete them because they have been deleted from gmail. I'm not sure you would get them back. Oh. Wait. You could take your gmail account offline, then restore from Time Machine with your gmail account remaining offline until you have had a chance to go in and grab those drafts. Frankly, I'd rather retype a long email than try to restore a mailbox from a Time Machine backup.