Lost mail in OS Catalina upgrade
I lost all my emails in Apple Mail doing a system upgrade to OS Catalina!
Does anyone know if they have fixed this yet so we can join on the ios upgrade?
Question marked as
Several people have reported lost or blank e-mail messages after updating macOS to Catalina. I lost 50,000 messages. Here's my solution, which requires a back-up of messages made before the Catalina update.
- Restore the folder V6 from User/Library/Mail to the desktop.
- Open Mail if it is not already open.
- Create a new mailbox where you will put recovered messages so that you can review them before storing them with other messages.
- Select the command "File" - "Import Mailboxes … ", then select "Apple Mail" as the format.
- Look in the folder V6 on your desktop for a mailbox that you want to restore, select it, then click "Continue". The import will start. A message will tell you when the import is done.
- After the messages have been imported, the messages will be in a new mailbox called "Import". Within that folder, they will be either in the simple folder structure that you would expect or in a multi-level folder hierarchy. If they are in a simple folder structure, click on a message in the message list, press command-A to select all the messages, and drag them to the folder that you created in step 3. If they are in a multi-level hierarchy, option-click on the triangle next to the folder called "Import" to expand the hierarchy. Command-click on all folders named "Messages". Click on one of the messages in the message list. Press command-A to select all messages in the message list. Click and drag the messages to the new mailbox that you created in step 3.
- Progress in moving the messages will be shown at the bottom of the folder list. After all the messages have been moved, delete the "Import" folder by right-clicking on it and selecting "Delete Mailbox … "
- Repeat steps 3 to 7 for other mailboxes.
Methods that did not work for me:
- Re-building mailboxes.
- Deleting envelope files in folder V7 and forcing Mail to re-index V7 messages.
- Temporarily removing folder V7 and forcing Mail to re-convert messages from folder V6.
- Restoring a Time Machine back-up from within Mail. Mail crashes.
179 replies
Excited to hear if all works well on OS XI Bug Sur tomorrow. Who dares first?
Ha! I've been thinking about it. Would be nice to have my pics flow from phone to mac easily (as it should anyway) but have been waiting for someone else to take the plunge!
And ? Anyone migrated from 10.14 to 11??
MacPear, I haven't done the import yet, but the exported files only contain the raw mail messages—you can view them with TextEdit—so there is no account settings or login information that could be imported. ―Ken
> You can restore the mail from your last backup prior to upgrading to Catalina. All of the mail files will be in your User/Home/Library/Mail/V7 folder.
Not sure what you mean. I'm using Sierra and want to upgrade to Catalina.
I have all my 44,000 emails in Mail – no problem.
So why should I restore before upgrading? As a preparation...?
My Mail folder looks like this:
DonCromwell wrote:
I did abandon Apple Mail and installed a free version of Outlook - a proven Microsoft program that never fails.
Really – would you trust MS with your emails...? Maybe Postbox? ($2.49/month)
My method worked fine. Those 1500 messages were in my mail database until I upgraded to Catalina. I recovered them and I am now able to access them — but only in a different mail program.
I am convinced that Apple Mail has bugs in converting messages from previous OS versions, in importing messages through the menu command, and in displaying all the messages that are in the mail database.
I was waiting for Apple’s help in solving the problem of 50,000 missing e-mail messages. But I got them back myself. The only things I want from Apple now are explanations: why the messages were lost in the first place, why messages appear with the wrong send/receive dates (while a different mail program shows the right dates), and why Mail does not display all the messages that are in the database (while a different mail program does display them all).
vbat wrote:
when you download your e-mails from a POP account, they are erased from four distant POP account server
... only if you set up Mail to do so! I never did:
Only after backing up my Mac, I delete my POP mails via webmail from the server.
Ken and coxorange: Spot check. There’s no way you want to check thousands of messages. I needed only a few seconds to see problems with my messages. All my problems occurred in mailboxes with over 1000 messages. As soon as I opened up some of those mailboxes, I could see wrong message counts, old messages with today’s date, and messages with no bodies. That’s all I needed to see to know that the upgrade or conversion or import was not reliable and to know that I had to do something else.
coxorange:
(2b) I’m not aware of a reason why noting unread messages is necessary with this method. All my problems have been with messages stored in the “On My Mac” account. I don’t keep unread messages there. I don’t know if Catalina has problems with read/unread status. I use only IMAP. If you’re using POP, there may be issues that I’m not aware of.
(4) Right. My mistake.
(5) You’re copying folders and mailboxes. The structure stays intact. Messages don’t get mixed. Perhaps you’re not used to creating folders in IMAP accounts and you rely heavily on your inbox. But creating new folders and mailboxes is easy. You do it just as you created your 24 folders and the mailboxes that they contain.
(7) I’m not aware of a reason why counting messages in your inbox is necessary. This method does not change the contents of your inbox. See (5) above. You’re going to have 24 new folders in your IMAP account. Those are the counts that you have to worry about. I have not seen IMAP inbox problems with Catalina. All my problems have been with messages stored in other folders and mailboxes in the “On My Mac” account. I use only IMAP. If you’re using POP, there may be issues that I’m not aware of.
I couldn't resist a test. I upgraded to 10.15.3. Then I made my mail folder look as it did before Catalina. When I opened Mail, Mail did its routine importing messages from V6, as if I were upgrading to Catalina for the first time.
One sign was promising: the message counts were accurate. But all the other problems remain: missing bodies, missing headers, wrong dates.
And there may be a new problem: my large, problematic folders were imported with the file path as the folder name. A mystery is why that file path is to my desktop, where I had a locked copy of my V6 folder under a different name, when other signs make clear that Mail converted messages from the copy of my V6 folder that was in my /Library/Mail folder. (Those "signs": that copy of my V6 folder is gone, presumably because Mail deleted it after conversion.)
G'day vbat,
I understand that your upgrade to Catalina 10.15.3 was from 10.15.1 or 10.15.2. If this is true then I doubt you ran the code in the upgrade that destroys the Mail database. So we don't know if the issue is fixed.
(I am assuming here that in the upgrade to Catalina some reformatting of messages takes place between v<something> and v7. I am further assuming that this takes place in your first upgrade to Catalina (whether this is to 10.15.1, 10.15.2 or 10.15.3) but not in subsequent Catalina to Catalina upgrades (because it has already been done - mail is already v7). I am further assuming that it is this reformatting code that damages or destroys mail.)
If my assumptions are correct then we won't know for sure that the issue is fixed until sufficient people have successfully upgraded from pre-Catalina MacOS to 10.15.3 (or better). tripteron's test described below is a bit inconclusive because the starting condition is non-standard. But the result suggests that the issue remains.
Select the respective account in the sidebar, Menu View -> Disable Message Filter
hope it helps
Lost mail in OS Catalina upgrade