Lost Mailbox and Mail

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Level 1

14 points

Lost Mailbox and Mail

OK so this was a chain of events which is getting worse by the minute. I was having problems with my gmail account pulling down into mail on my desktop. So i thought it would be a great idea to delete the account and start over again. Not knowing that when you do that, you lose all the associated mail with that account. So when the new account was created im now looking at a mailbox missing 19000 messages. I hadn't set up time machine yet either, so my question is can you recover the lost mail from wherever its being stored on your machine?

MacBookPro 15inch 2.4GHz, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Dec 22, 2007 9:12 AM

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Answer 1

V.K.

Level 9

56,192 points

Dec 22, 2007 10:31 AM in response to Jayykayy

19000 gmail messages. that's a lot! nevertheless with gmail you can pull them all from the server. if you use IMap gmail then all the messages will download automatically once you take the account online. If you use POP gmail then you have to go to gmail POP preferences in webmail gmail and check the option "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)" in the "Settings" tab.

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Answer 2

Jayykayy Author

Level 1

14 points

Dec 22, 2007 11:23 AM in response to V.K.

Hey what can i say i like to talk 🙂

The problem on further investigation seems more complex. I'm a PC convert and used to dealing with folders more than the package system of linux. So in my migration to mail from outlook, i appear to have moved email into the wrong account folders.

When you look at your mail and see the inbox and below that your individual account in boxes. Where is the top level inbox stored? I have been through my mail storage area against my profile and i can see the inboxes for the individual accounts but not the top level one. I think whats happened is i have inadvertently moved email at some stage out of the individual accounts and put it in the top level one. Effectively removing it from any one account. If that makes sense?

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Answer 3

V.K.

Level 9

56,192 points

Dec 22, 2007 11:40 AM in response to Jayykayy

I don't think it's possible to move e-mail from individual mailboxes to the top-level mbox. In general, all your mail sits in the directory user/Library/Mail.
Even if you delete an e-mail account, your old messages should still be there. there is no "top-level" mbox as you call it though. Mail.app doesn't work that way.

However, I still don't see why you can't download all the messages from the server.

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Answer 4

Jayykayy Author

Level 1

14 points

Dec 22, 2007 12:27 PM in response to V.K.

Give it a try. Go to a lower mailbox and then drag a single email from there into the top level one. You will see it disappear from the lower one and is only visible if you click on the top summary mailbox

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Answer 5

V.K.

Level 9

56,192 points

Dec 22, 2007 1:16 PM in response to Jayykayy

You are right. I dragged an email from gmail to the top level and it disappeared from the inbox. when I did spotlight search I could still find it inside the gmail inbox. However, once I restarted Mail, it was TOTALLY gone from the computer. what's worse, it was totally gone from the mail server! This is very weird. It looks like you are in trouble here and dragging an e-mail to the top level automatically deletes it. Not a nice feature of Mail if that's really the case.

BTW, I forgot to ask. Do you have TM backups? This might be your last/best option.

Message was edited by: V.K.

Message was edited by: V.K.

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Answer 6

V.K.

Level 9

56,192 points

Dec 22, 2007 1:32 PM in response to V.K.

sorry, that e-mail was actually NOT deleted from the gmail server. It was sitting in Allmail (but was removed from the inbox).

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Answer 7

Jayykayy Author

Level 1

14 points

Dec 22, 2007 7:12 PM in response to V.K.

Pretty worrying i know. I managed to recover the bulk of my mail from a backup i made 2 weeks ago (i know that was lazy on my part) then i used a nifty trick by putting recent: in front of my gmail user name i was able to download the last 30 days worth of pop3 email again. I spent the whole day on this but at least im back to where i started!

I hadnt set up time machine yet, because i was waiting to by a new backup harddrive that works with TM. Prior to leopard i was backing up to my 160GB Ipod, but this is not compatible with TM. I'm using chronosync in the meantime.

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