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Disappearing Emails - Email specialist required!

I keep most of my emails for reference purposes and had thousands going back four years.


For various reasons I decided to delete the originals from my BT Yahoo online account only to discover that all the old emails in my Apple Mail on my computer had also disappeared.


I had always assumed that the emails were a physical entity on my Mac once they had been downloaded and appeared in Mail.


So why have they disappeared?


Have they gone forever or can they be recovered?

iMac 27" 5K, macOS 10.14

Posted on Jun 1, 2019 1:12 AM

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Posted on Jun 1, 2019 1:32 AM

It depends on the type of account.

It appears that you may have an IMAP account. With IMAP, your e-mail client will mimic what is in the server.

Your best bet is to login to your account using webmail and see if the stuff you deleted is still in the trash.


For the future, you should note that on the Mail sidebar there is a “On my Mac”. Any mailboxes you create “On my Mac” are stored - you guessed it - on your mac, and independently of any of your accounts, they will remain even if your account is disconnected or is removed altogether.

When you want to retain a message but delete it from the server, move it some mailbox under “On my Mac”.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jun 1, 2019 1:32 AM in response to Ian R. Brown

It depends on the type of account.

It appears that you may have an IMAP account. With IMAP, your e-mail client will mimic what is in the server.

Your best bet is to login to your account using webmail and see if the stuff you deleted is still in the trash.


For the future, you should note that on the Mail sidebar there is a “On my Mac”. Any mailboxes you create “On my Mac” are stored - you guessed it - on your mac, and independently of any of your accounts, they will remain even if your account is disconnected or is removed altogether.

When you want to retain a message but delete it from the server, move it some mailbox under “On my Mac”.

Jun 1, 2019 1:43 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Thanks for the rapid response Luis.


Unfortunately I was very thorough and also emptied the trash on my account.


Another thing I don't understand is that before I deleted everything online, I could view my emails in Mail even when the computer was not connected to the internet, so the emails appeared to have some physical presence on my Mac at that time.

Jun 2, 2019 2:19 AM in response to LD150

Thanks for the further information from both of you.


I have a strong feeling that having deleted the emails and then the trash, the emails will probably be unrecoverable.


I wonder how many other people save over 90% of their emails routinely? I do it for the odd (rare) occasion where it can be helpful to review what has been said previously but find that the Mail folder can quickly expand into the gigabytes!

Disappearing Emails - Email specialist required!

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