Resolved I did a stupid thing with Mail

[JasonHB]

I am desperately hoping that someone is able to help me with a really stupid thing that I did.

Our email provider has recently upgraded to IMAP from POP, so I added a new account with all of the new IMAP details, downloaded all my messages from the server, tested to make sure all was working and then deleted the old POP account from my MBP.

The problem is that as I did it I realised that ALL of my sent messages through that account are also deleted - this is 2 years of messages and they are all gone.

I know that I cannot get these back from the server as it was POP and sent messages are kept on my MBP. However, when I upgraded to Lion, I cloned my HDD and I was wondering whether there was any way that I could get my sent messages back from that?

I look forward to hearing from anyone soon with a solution (I hope)

Thanks in advance.

Jason

 

[talmy]

You are in luck. Boot the old image and start Mail. Select the mail folder(s) of interest and export the mailboxes. These create .mbox packages. Copy these to your new system and then import them.

 

[kingtj]

Ummm.... yeah ....

If you were using Time Machine, I don't see why you couldn't just launch Mail and step back in Time Machine to right before you made the change, and export a copy of all of your messages under "Sent Items" to a file someplace else on the drive?

If you're not using Time Machine, it sounds like you have a bigger problem. Your sent items are still on that cloned drive image, but you'll probably create more email issues if you just restored that to your MBP and tried to start over again with converting your email from POP to IMAP. (You'll lose all the new email you received since you first did the conversion, for example -- unless you go to the trouble to back all of that up to some other device like a USB memory stick before restoring the image.) Still, that might be your only realistic way to get back 2 years worth of sent emails if you need them that badly.

(Ideally, I guess if you had a second, identically configured Macbook Pro to use, you could restore the image to it -- and then open Mail and export out the sent email to import back into Mail on your own machine. But not too likely you've got extra hardware around like that!)

I am desperately hoping that someone is able to help me with a really stupid thing that I did.

Our email provider has recently upgraded to IMAP from POP, so I added a new account with all of the new IMAP details, downloaded all my messages from the server, tested to make sure all was working and then deleted the old POP account from my MBP.

The problem is that as I did it I realised that ALL of my sent messages through that account are also deleted - this is 2 years of messages and they are all gone.

I know that I cannot get these back from the server as it was POP and sent messages are kept on my MBP. However, when I upgraded to Lion, I cloned my HDD and I was wondering whether there was any way that I could get my sent messages back from that?

I look forward to hearing from anyone soon with a solution (I hope)

Thanks in advance.

Jason

 

[kingtj]

Oh...

Yeah, this makes sense too... but I guess I was assuming your backed up drive image might not be bootable like that? (EG. You made it with a backup utility like Retrospect that compressed the data into proprietary files that only it can restore.)

You are in luck. Boot the old image and start Mail. Select the mail folder(s) of interest and export the mailboxes. These create .mbox packages. Copy these to your new system and then import them.

 

[talmy]

He said "cloned" which would imply CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper! or even Disk Utility which make bootable copies.

 

[phassat]

He said "cloned" which would imply CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper! or even Disk Utility which make bootable copies.

Agree with you…. if you have cloned it, then you can boot from it… and you can export to mbox as told by the guy above me…..

 

[JasonHB]

It was done with Carbon Copy and I haven't tried to boot from the external drive yet.

However, I did go into the parse image file and tried to open Mail from there but it just comes up with errors.

I have then gone into the user library and found the mbox file with all of the sent messages in it.

I copied that to my HDD and tried to import it, but it says that there are no valid mbox files.

Any ideas why that might be?

Jason

 

[JasonHB]

You are in luck. Boot the old image and start Mail. Select the mail folder(s) of interest and export the mailboxes. These create .mbox packages. Copy these to your new system and then import them.

I could not import this as a mbox file, however, when I went to "import from Mail" I could then do it.

Thanks ever so much for your help.

This has certainly made me feel a lot calmer.

Thanks

Jason