Apple Mail Restore Problem

[cp1160]

After upgrading to 10.4.9 I encountered a number of major issues that resulted in having to do a major reconstruction of my MacBook Pro. Apparently having Parallels version 1970 installed can cause an upgrade failure (since I could recreate it). Anyway, here's the result.

After getting my system restored, I started up Apple Mail to get new messages. When mail open, every message was duplicated. I wasn't sure what happened, but patiently deleted one copy of every message. I emptied my Trash since the messages were nearly 750 mb. Instant disaster - my Apple Mail Inbox now show exactly NO messages - everything was gone. I went online to my .Mac account which I use for the majority of my messages and it too was completely cleaned out. Ouch!

I have an automatic backup of my mail run every night so I figure I won't have any problems, so I restore a number of my backups. When I look in my Users Account under Library I can see the Mail folder, and when I open the Mail folder I see a Mailboxes folder and a Mac-[my user name] folder. The Mailboxes folder has an inbox for every account except my .Mac mail account. The Mac-[my user name] folder has a folder INBOX.imapmbox and when I open it all of my messages have been restored. So far so good I guess.

When I start up Apple Mail though none of these messages show up. I tried Rebuild and some other options and nothing changes. I can't drag them to the mailbox and the content of the messages does not show up in Spotlight so they are not being searched. I can open the individual emails in the folder, but with 1,000 or so messages its not too feasible to use.

Is there anyway to get these messages to appear in Apple Mail again? I have an Offline Mailbox and it has messages, so I tried copying the messages to that mailbox folder, but they don 't show up there either.

Any ideas? Any help? I searched and searched but could not find any help that seemed to match my problem.

John

 

[Lixivial]

OK.

So you're saying that the *.emlx files exist in your ~/Library/Mail/Mac-{username} directory? Have you attempted to do an "File -> Import Mailboxes..." and browsing to that folder?

 

[cp1160]

Apple Mail Restore

When I got to that directory there are hundreds of messages that I can click on an open in Apple Mail, so the messages exist.

I can't seem to get them to import though - when I browse to that folder I can the following error:

"Error"
"No Valid Mail for OS X Files were found."

The messages show up and I am at the lowest level. Do I need to try some other approach?

John

 

[Lixivial]

When importing the mailbox, you should be browsing out to the directory that contains your .imapmbox, and not the INBOX.imapmbox itself. Please note that you may have to rename your INBOX.imapmbox to INBOX.mbox for the import to work.

In your instance you'd choose the folder ~/Library/Mail/Mac-{username}

When you do this, you'll be prompted with all the available mailboxes. In your instance, there'll probably just be one. For further clarification on this, you may want to read this hint and all the related comments.