Lost mail in OS Catalina upgrade

G'day,

Have a look at page 8 of this conversation. The last entry will confirm that there is a procedure to recover the e-mails and will point you to the procedure and some amplifying comments.

Same, This update has cost me over a day just trying to sort out the damage to my emails it has caused with no clear resolution. First the install was endless then the lost emails. See next response for the details of the problem.

Apple (a nice guy that called me from Austin, Texas, after my post on this discussion thread) is unsure if the update addresses the specific mail issue I encountered. And in the main improvements and fixes with this update, there is no mention of the mail issue. He advises me to have an up to date TimeMachine backup if I decide to upgrade to macOS 10.15.1.

I prefer to stay with Mojave and wait for a definitive and reassuring answer.

I think that this issue could be a time bomb: when users ‘ll need to restore their system from TimeMachine, and if they have pop mail accounts, they could be profoundly impacted if e-mails are lost.

Wait and see...

I was thinking, that my loss of about 50,000 e-mail's content, when upgrading from Mojave v10.14.6+Supp. Upd. 2019-001, to Catalina v10.5.1 , and the subsequent Apple Mail failures, MAY be the result of my disabling the hyper-threading feature, of my CPUs, but this is just a guess .

I had already HAD the hyper-threading feature, disabled, in Mojave, to guard-against the "Meltdown", "Spectre"-variants, "ZombieLoad", and "SWAPGS", CPU-hardware-flaw-threats, but found, that SOME applications, in rare-cases, did not perform, well, with the hyper-threading feature, disabled . You can tell, if the hyper-threading-feature is enabled, or disabled, by cranking-up the "System Information" Utility, and clicking upon the "Hardware"-heading, on the left, and looking at the readout, in the main portion of the window .

I may wait, until the Catalina v10.15.2 update, comes-out, and see if it restores the e-mail, -or-, I may try to re-enable the hyper-threading, and see if I can restore my Apple Mail contents by running Apple Mail, & Time Machine, simultaneously (THAT combination, consistently crashes, currently) .

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.

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 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.

CuriousCanadian wrote:

My case has been added to the list of '100 or so users' who are having the same problem. Apple is 'working on it' but it isn't a very high priority since 'only a few' people are affected.

Perhaps only 100 or so users have contacted Apple support because of this issue, but how many may just have not noticed yet that their emails are missing? And may have made fresh backups under Catalina? And may have used the old backup drives (which contained their emails) otherwise in the meantime?

So I would say this issue should have high priority!

Apple's "moderator" took out all my information - such as exactly how bad my email problem is.

1. Apple Mail was crashing EVERY SINGLE TIME it opened
2. Many hours and calls with Apple, and latest was to do a full new re-install and restore from time machine
3. The latter has blown up all my mail - I have to 'import' which means losing 10 years' worth of categorization and organization flagging etc., smarboxes, nomenclature, categorization, including information needed for divorce litigation - the reason I told Apple I could not simply delete the accounts and start over - needed my email intact - critical for the legal case I'm involved in - and guess what? SMACKED DOWN.

Contacted Apple Support about the latest problem, and almost lost my mind dealing with their godawful 'callback' that calls me back and when I answer gives a long pause, followed by "This is Apple Support. We tried to reach you. We'll try again later" even though I was THERE on the line trying to talk to them. Eventually I got through, albeit very hangrytired by then...and can not reach the dedicated senior person who promised to stay with me on this case until it was resolved. Got second level support who said 'just reply to the email we sent you'...but there is no email. They can't even generate emails to me to respond to to upload a screen shot, because something is wrong with their system. Some kind of 'lock'.

Got cut off - my bad trying to answer another auto-call from a prior effort to contact Apple'.

Contacted Apple support again and the next 2nd level person was a bit rude 'Well, don't you have a backup?"

Yes...and no...did not have disk space for a full back up, so this is a problem.

The long and the short.

Catalina blew up my Apple Mail and left me USER DOWN since November with Mail.

Efforts to fix the problem have made it worse. The workaround makes it worse. (import vs restore means losing all your organization etc.)

Support system is broken.

Wasted time, lost data and potentially I will be screwed in litigation because I can't access my data.

[Edited by Moderator]

Same problem for me. Upgraded to 10.15.2 and opened up Apple mail and I have zero emails and all my internet accounts are gone. I made a complete bootable backup before upgrading. Going to trash Catalina and revert to my backup.

While some recovery methods work for some the rest of us are left with 10s of thousands of emails just gone. Deleted by a problem in the upgrade process. A lesson to be learned to back up before you do any upgrade. I wax on the phone with Apple, they initiated the call the tech finally had to admit the emails were gone.

Tripteron wrote:

1. I imported messages from a back-up of V6 mail into Apple Mail (Catalina).

2. I exported messages from Apple Mail into folders on my hard drive.

3. I imported those messages into Postbox.

I just don't understand why you "risked" going via Mail,

and didn't import direct from V6 to Postbox...?

Tripteron wrote:

I was still trying to get Apple Mail to work for me. I didn't know that it would not display all my imported messages. Importing directly from the V6 folder into Postbox seems reasonable to me.

Please could you try reimporting your mails from Postbox to Apple Mail?

Ideally those who didn't show in Mail previously?

Maybe this could be the cure?

An Apple rep. and I just spoke for the third time. He. said that the engineers did not have anything more to tell me other than to suggest that I recover messages from the V6 folder (as I had done, see earlier in this thread). They don't have any more trouble-shooting ideas. The rep. said that the problems would be communicated with the software developers. If anything more will happen on this issue, it will happen in a future software release. No promises or predictions (which is understandable).

Ken:

What my suggested method does is transfer locally stored messages (that are not on a mail server and so not available for downloading) from an earlier macOS version to Catalina by putting them into an IMAP account (i.e., on a mail server) and then, if necessary, yes, downloading them and putting them back into locally stored folders.