Account Changes made all of my messages in Mail dissapear

[18thTomorrow]

Hello,

Recently my username/password for my e-mail account changed. (POP settings, servers, e-mail address-everything else remained the same, the only thing that changed was the login name and password for the account.)

I changed the connection information in Mail to reflect that, however when I clicked OK, it deleted all of the messages in my inbox (leaving my other folders, trash can, sent, outbox, etc.)

Why did it do this and is there a way I can get these messages back, or are they gone forever? (No, they're not stored on the server.) Those were my messages that needed attention, with important orders & account information...

 

[mad jew]

In your Home folder, there's a folder named Library, within which is another folder named Mail. In here, you should see a variety of other folders and inside one of them (generally named after your email address) will be the folders where all your email is kept. If your mail is anywhere, it's somewhere in here.

 

[jsw]

I'd highly recommend finding the Mail folder mentioned above (Library->Mail), right-clicking (or control-clicking) on it and selecting "Create Archive of 'Mail'" before doing anything else (after first closing Mail, of course).

Odds are that everything is still there, but archive it first in case something bad happens.

Likely some index file is screwy, and we can fix it, but it's best to be safe. Also, go into Mail->Preferences->General and set it to check for new mail manually before doing the archive so you don't risk any loss of new emails because of automatic checking when we're fixing things.

Edit: I'm on child herding duty for the next hour or two, so I'll only be around sporadically, but I will look into this later if there's no fix before then.

 

[jsw]

OK, I strongly suspect that everything is still there and Mail is just a bit confused.

I'm going to sleep soon, but here's something to try.

First, be sure you've stopped Mail from automatically checking for new email (as mentioned, this is just to make sure new mail doesn't come in and get lost if you revert to the saved files). Then quit Mail.

Second, make that archive of your entire Mail folder. This is your safety net. If you'd like, move it elsewhere, but you don't need to.

Third, go to your Mail folder - the one you backed up - and use Spotlight to search for table_of_contents and then for content_index. Delete any files that come up with those exact names.

Start Mail and see if you see your emails again.

If not, delete your current Mail folder and unzip the Mail archive file - keeping it around for later use if other suggestions also fail. If you need to keep using Mail and this suggestion fails, then copy that original Mail.zip somewhere safe and keep using Mail, making a second archive later on when you're trying another approach.

I'm sure we can get this working, it's just a matter of time.

Good night for now...

 

[18thTomorrow]

Worked. Thanks so much, jsw. My hero.

 

[jsw]

Worked. Thanks so much, jsw. My hero.

I'm glad! I had an account screw up before, and that trick worked for me - but I wasn't sure if it'd fix your problem. Thanks so much for posting back to let me know!