PSA: Apple Mail Bugs Can Lead to Data Loss in macOS Catalina

[SteveW928]

Answer then: use another email client.

Unfortunately, that was the conclusion I came to in the mid-2000s. I used to love Apple's Mail (and Claris' before that). But, Apple just doesn't take their apps seriously. When stuff goes wrong, they may or may not get around to fixing it, next month, next year, or next decade. Who knows?

I switched to using Postbox which has been quite stable. The UI isn't quite as nice, but it works quite well. The biggest thing I miss is the Apple-style print preview, and that it doesn't seem to use the default Apple text handling (ie. when you highlight a word and right-click, you get a different set of options). I'm guessing it is using the web engine or something, as I think it is based on Thunderbird.

 

[profdraper]

Went at it again, finally managed to fix it and indeed *everything* in now there again in Apple Mail: by deleting every Mail pref, Mailboxes, Internet accounts, rebooting in between, also running Onyx to delete any Mail index (just to be sure). In sum, this article pretty much covers it: appletoolbox.com/mail-not-working-in-macos-catalina-how-to-fix/

 

[ArdvbB]

I made a bold decision a few months ago. I implemented O365. My Apple mail was destroyed and I lost a good deal of my archives. Luckily I still have my old .pst files. But mail from the last 10 years (using apple mail) has been lost.

Just before the Corona virus I had O365 up and running including Teams. So that was a good thing.

I also built up my iMacs from scratch too (they did not shut down anymore). Now everything works again. My plan is to run behind updates for at least a year.

Catalina has been a very very bad piece of work by Apple and it costed me a lot of days to recover from that (the mail was never recovered). Before Catalina it all worked fine.

Catalina not only sounds a bit like Corona.
[automerge]1590917924[/automerge]
By the way not only my email data was destroyed. Also my Photo library and my music library is a mess. So apple and databases, I do not know if that is a good combination.

 

[gryff]

The issue was fixed in 10.15.3.

I had the same problem with content missing after moving messages between local/offline mailboxes. Issues seems to be resolved after upgrading to 10.15.3 yesterday. Messages that lost content are still missing that content, but now moving messages doesn't cause the body to disappear any longer.

 

[SteveW928]

... My plan is to run behind updates for at least a year.

Catalina has been a very very bad piece of work by Apple ...

By the way not only my email data was destroyed. Also my Photo library and my music library is a mess. So apple and databases, I do not know if that is a good combination.

Yes, I now wait ~1 year before upgrading macOS. Of course, if you buy a new machine, that might not be an option. This just seems to be the 'new' Apple, or at least one that put the Mac on the back-burner for a decade or so. I'm *hoping* they are starting to fix that, but not sure when it will get to the OS. They've LONG had issues with particular apps, though.

I also gave up on Apple for photos and music. They made a horrific mess of all of that, so I'm just trying to find a good platform to move to. I've been trying Plex, but they have lots of issues too.

 

[return2sendai]

And still it comes.

 

[globalmatt]

Anyone know if all these bugs are fixed in Monterey? 🤞

 

[Zeitkind]

Anyone know if all these bugs are fixed in Monterey? 🤞

No idea, machines on Catalina still show here several bugs in Apple Mail, most annoying are blank mails and loss of mails with IMAP. No machines on Big Sure yet (due to Adobe & Co.), so I can't really answer your question. But well, we had 3 machines out of ~20 losing reproducibly big parts of their POP3 mail archives and some still have problems rendering new mails correctly. The machines that were unable to reimport the mails have now a copy of their timemachine-backup (~/Library/Mail/V5/) as archive, it's a weird folder structure, but you can at least search for old mails via Spotlight. If anyone has a tip on how to export and import Apple Mail folder structures into anything else? Not tested Emailchemy recently, but don't really like to pay a site-license just to handle Apple's failures...

 

[tivoboy]

Jeez GOD!... I just did an update from High Sierra to Catalina, and boom all my mail, IMAP and POP are gone in the apple mail app. Of course I have a backup, but no idea how that process needs to be handled, accounts, passwords, etc?

All the ACCOUNTS are missing all the settings and setup are gone? Is this somehow what is supposed to happen?

I did an inplace update on my mail machine figuring it would be okay and boom everything GONE!.. can someone point to the easiest set of links to try and restore from backup or what update can one do to get it restored? The links listed in parts of this thread don't seem to be working at all. I can't imagine that they are GONE GONE just can't be found or configured in the app. would moving to the MEXT os, I guess Big Sur do anything?

Im my USER/LIBRARY/MAIL folder I do seem to have this V7 folder, and underneath that seem to be what would appear to be the accounts, the names are listed, which ones are POP or IMAP etc.. and inside those folders seem to be what would appear to be large folders/files meaning all of the legacy mail. GB of mail.

Is there some way to repoint the MAIL app to this folder or these configurations?

 

[Zeitkind]

Well, tbh, if you don't know how to handle this, get someone who has enough knowledge doing this.
in short:
- Take care of your backups, you may need them many times. Disable Time Machine on the new system to prevent erasing older backups in case you need them. Get a new backup drive for new backups and "freeze" the old backups.
- Close Apple Mail and check if all mds processes are finished, restore the Mail folder and settings in ~/Library and start over importing. If it fails again, well, it might fail again and again. In this case you need a new strategy. Yes, switching to Linux can be a good strategy, but keep that or later. First try to restore the old Mail folder and its content to a local drive and use Spotlight to access your old emails - better than nothing. Then restore your accounts and start with a new and empty Apple Mail..
We had this problem on several machines, some could be restored by redoing the import several times, some could not be restored and we started with new Mail accounts and kept the old emails locally accessible via Spotlight as a kind of archive only. If you have everything on an IMAP-server - you may be lucky anyway.
Apple Mail on Catalina & up is one of the most unreliable email clients I ever used. And Apple even killed the possibility to switch to non-HTML view, which makes so many problems with Outlook-formated email atm, it's unbelievable.

 

[tivoboy]

Well, tbh, if you don't know how to handle this, get someone who has enough knowledge doing this.
in short:
- Take care of your backups, you may need them many times. Disable Time Machine on the new system to prevent erasing older backups in case you need them. Get a new backup drive for new backups and "freeze" the old backups.
- Close Apple Mail and check if all mds processes are finished, restore the Mail folder and settings in ~/Library and start over importing. If it fails again, well, it might fail again and again. In this case you need a new strategy. Yes, switching to Linux can be a good strategy, but keep that or later. First try to restore the old Mail folder and its content to a local drive and use Spotlight to access your old emails - better than nothing. Then restore your accounts and start with a new and empty Apple Mail..
We had this problem on several machines, some could be restored by redoing the import several times, some could not be restored and we started with new Mail accounts and kept the old emails locally accessible via Spotlight as a kind of archive only. If you have everything on an IMAP-server - you may be lucky anyway.
Apple Mail on Catalina & up is one of the most unreliable email clients I ever used. And Apple even killed the possibility to switch to non-HTML view, which makes so many problems with Outlook-formated email atm, it's unbelievable.

Thanks.

No, I’m pretty good at these things but at this point I’m looking for the most optimal and reliable path. I have full TM backups, but I find it quite odd that it would appear that all the mail, the accounts, etc are in the V7 folder resident on the machine. Shouldn’t there be some terminal option or pflist delete and let it rebuild option to get it kick started?

 

[Zeitkind]

Compare the sizes of the Mail folders. In my cases, the emails were indeed deleted and were no longer there.

 

[pen-helm]

Apparently there's still mail loss trouble sometimes even on Monterey 12.3.1.

You could back up your mail using EagleFiler, Mail Backup X or Mail Archiver X.