Importing .emlx files -or- Finding local, deleted emails

[l008com]

Long story short, I'm recovering emails off my grandmother's old G4 Mac mini. Due to the search feature defaulting to "all mail" instead of the folder I was in, I accidentally deleted her sent mail, instead of deleting a copy of it like I intended.

This is in "On My Mac" mail, all local.
So I look for the trash and there is no trash. I "Go To" the trash via the Mailbox menu and trash appears, but its empty.

So I go poking around ~/Library/Mail and on the filesystem, the Sent mail is still in my custom Sent folder. I can see the .emlx files still in there. So I copy this folder to the desktop, because if I can re-import these emails, problem solved.

But no matter how I try, I cannot get them to import. The Mail Importer just scans them but sees nothing it can import.

I remember this kind of problem being common back in the day, apple's mail importing being a real ball buster. But I don't remember what the solution was OTHER THAN to export from within the program, rather than grabbing from the filesystem. But thats sure not an option here.

 

[l008com]

Well I got it done, but probably in a way that won't be helpful to anyone. I couldn't find any way to re-import those .emlx files. Then I remembered I still have a license to Emailchemy from an appointment years ago. So I fired it up and used it to import the raw .mbox folder into a proper format that Apple Mail had no problem importing.

So I never found anyplace Mail stores deleted local emails. They just went poof.

And I never found a non-3rd party way to import raw email data folders back into the Mail program.

And I never found out why these folders still had the email files in them to begin with, and why they weren't showing up in the Mail program if the email files were there in the data folder.

But despite all that, its all done, mission accomplished.