Lost all Mail.app!!

[djsound]

I have an imac with osx 10.6.6 and someone just blew a fuse in my house. When I turned computer back on I went to open mail.app and it asks me to set up an account like I dont have any at all. But i had 3 accounts setup in Mail. Have I lost everything? It seems that mac does not have any 'restore' feature like windows does....any ideas?

edit - a created a temp account to get into Mail and all my mailboxes are still there but the accounts are all gone...I guess I have to redo them?

 

[maflynn]

Check your hard drive for problems and restore from a backup

 

[djsound]

I dont make my own backups with time machine yet..so I am guessing I dont have backups.

 

[splitpea]

Sounds like your plist (preferences) file got corrupted. Messages are actually stored in separate files -- apparently they were not deleted and were not too badly corrupted, so Mail.app can still read them.

I'd recommend the following:

1) Duplicate your mailboxes in case anything breaks when you re-create the accounts. Look for the following folders:

a) ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes -- mail you've filed
b) ~/Library/Mail/POP-[login info] -- mail still in your Inbox from each POP account
c) ~/Library/Mail/IMAP-[login info] -- mail still in your Inbox from each IMAP account

And copy them to somewhere like your desktop.

2) Re-set up your accounts in Mail.app's preferences. See if your email magically reappears in your inbox.

a) If not, you should be able to use the File->Import Mailboxes to re-import the mail from the POP and IMAP folders.

3) Go to each account's inbox and each local mailbox and run Mailbox->Rebuild, which should repair any corruption your mailboxes may have experienced due to the power outage.

 

[djsound]

I had 4 pop accounts.

I do see them in ~/Library/Mail/POP-[login info] but they are not in Mail.app They are all missing...gone.

I just need to find the "account info" then I can reload the contents from that folder. It is a inbox.mbox file...

I dont care to much about my mailboxes. I do wish however that I could load my 4 accounts from some file because I am bad at setting them up and it will take forever because I do not remember all the info