Lost mail in OS Catalina upgrade

Any word on whether or not today's 10.15.2 Catalina build solves the Mail issues when upgrading from Mojave? I've been holding off upgrading to Catalina on all my machines due to the problems being reported...

Yeah, I saw that in the release notes. But it doesn't seem to indicate that it helps the issue this thread is discussing. I know that often with these updates, they don't always advertise all the fixes.

A Mail.app window, with Time Machine.app to be activated upon it, STILL immediately crashes, under macOS Catalina v10.15.2,

before any mailboxes, can be re-built -- so, no, this method of recovering non-displaying e-mail content, STILL cannot be accomplished, it would seem .

I upgraded to Catalina. A clean install. I have now discovered that 90,000 emails are missing, dating from 2000. The mail folder size is not 2.7GB as compared with the usual >35GB in size. For example, we are missing our email records of invoices sent out to customers. That's how we discovered the problem ... we tried to find the old records (messages) in Mail. The Mail record is no longer reliable. We cannot full tell what is there and what is missing. Fortunately we have an earlier backup. But the time and effort now required to rebuild the Mail database is significant. And, at this point, we can't trust Catalina to maintain it's integrity.

Rebuilding the Mail envelope indexes makes no difference.

Hi,

I don't know for the next OS 10.15.3, but the problem remains for 10.15.2. Apple is unable to solve the problem, I am very disappointed. More than 9,000 professional e-mails are lost of my MBP; Time Machine is unable to restore these lost emails. I cross fingers for the iMac of my office.

Nobody at Apple can tackle the problem and deal with it? It's serious. Since so many years with Apple, I never been so disappointed. It's very harmful for my activity.

Backtracking to a prior macOS, USED to cause some problems, as the newer O.S. had already updated the boot-code, and reverting, didn't always restore the old boot-code -- perhaps, my info, is not up-to-date, and THAT had changed, in past years .

MacPear wrote:

TM is able to restore your E-Mails. Make a clean install of 10.14 and restore with migration assistant.

I'm sure this would work for 10.14, but I thought AntMacDF didn't want to go back to the previous macOS, but fix Mail in 10.15 Catalina.

I can tell you that it works, that’s what I did as described above.

The question is why one would want to stick with 10.15 if he loses all those emails. In a professional setting, one could consider to buy one second iMac.

In my rather private setting, I just miss the features to manage the accounts for my children. So I will wait for 10.16

When your new car's wiper motor has failed, are you buying a new car? Me, I can't, and this would not solve the problem.

I know that TM is able to restore the e-mails, but after a downgrade to 10.14. But Mac OS 10.14 and iOS 10.13 are not fully compatible. And in any case, 10.15 should be fully operational, especially 2 months after its release.

I did not reverse back to Mojave but I did abandon Apple Mail and installed a free version of Outlook - a proven Microsoft program that never fails. Hopefully lost emails will be the only problem with Catalina. I am almost ready to by a Surface instead of my next upgrade to MBP. A combination tablet/laptop has a lot of appeal and I could learn windows all over again. Apple please get your S - - - together. Don't worry, I will not trade my Apple stock for Microsoft stock. :-)))

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)

Thanks a lot for your method!

Here some (hopefully not too difficult) questions:

1. You wrote: "Restore the folder V6 from User/Library/Mail to the desktop."

I assume you mean from a Time Machine backup for example?

And I assume you were using Mojave for your last backup?

I'm still using Sierra and have not upgraded to Catalina yet. On my TM backup I only find

• a V2 folder (in which there is only a MailData folder with one file: Accounts.plist) and

• a V4 folder (containing 30 folders - I believe there are my 44,000 emails) and

• one file: PersistenceInfo.plist

What shall I restore to the desktop? All?

2. Is your method suitable for POP email accounts? I only use POP. (I use IMAP (iCloud email accounts) only temporarily and have none of such mails stored on my Mac or backed up.)

3. Will your method bring back all the emails' attachments too?

4. I have most of my emails in my Inbox (devided into 18 email accounts, even the sent mails because I always Cc: myself) and the rest moved to 24 local mailbox folders under "On My Mac". Will the emails come back to this structure or will I lose it? It would be very time-consuming or even impossible to recreate the mailbox structure and to sort all emails manually into the structure again.

5. I have marked about a quarter of my emails as 'unread' - spread among my mailboxes. Will these marks be intact after the process?

Many thanks!

(BTW In the meantime, what does Apple say? Do they have an "official" method?)

(1) Yes, Time Machine. Yes, Mojave.

You should restore the V# folder with the highest number (apparently V4). When new versions of macOS and/or Mail come out, Apple increases the number of the folder. Sierra must have used V4. High Sierra must have used V5. Mojave used V6. Catalina uses V7.

(2) This method should work for any messages, I think, because all messages must get backed up.

(3) My attachments were restored.

(4) The messages are restored in new folders named the same as the folders that they were in when they were backed up. The new folders are sub-folders of a folder called "Import". Everything is done by folder. You do not have to re-file messages.

(5) I believe that messages get restored with with their attributes (read/unread, flagged, junk), but I'm not sure. I cannot tell because I did not have attributes set on my messages.

Good luck.

I missed your last question.

Apple had me try a few things such as safe mode, re-indexing, and restoring messages from within Mail, then escalated the problem from a senior e-mail person to someone even more knowledgeable. I'm waiting for their next idea, which may come after the holidays.

Many thanks for your answers!

Tripteron wrote:

You should restore the V# folder with the highest number (apparently V4). When new versions of macOS and/or Mail come out, Apple increases the number of the folder. Sierra must have used V4. High Sierra must have used V5. Mojave used V6. Catalina uses V7.

I understand, but why do I have this little V2 folder?

According to the above it seems to be a remnant of Yosemite.

I'm afraid it could cause trouble when upgrading to Catalina...