I lost all my emails in Apple Mail doing a system upgrade to OS Catalina!
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.
Methods that did not work for me:
I have also lost all my emails after upgrading to OS Catalina.. The only reason I use Apple products (rather than cheaper alternatives) is to avoid issues like this... Reading through the responses here, there seems to be no clear solution either!! How could this be? I am really really sorry...
Ok, I went for it. Upgraded from Mojave to Catalina. Went smooth. All emails appear to be intact. I have 2 iCloud accounts (originally dot Mac) dating back to 2006. All the email attachments and bodies are there. Exchange account is good. So are two Gmail accounts. I guess I'll upgrade my other machines now.
@vbat
I didn’t quite understand your procedure. why did you already have a V7 folder?
You upgraded to Catalina, you had your emails imported, then you made a time machine back up and recovered emails from that back up?
@Tripteron
you say your method (page4 in this thread) works even though you report that over 1500 emails but still missing? Other guys tried it and were not successful. Or do you have an updated step-by-step procedure but I have overlooked?
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250716550?answerId=251840868022#251840868022
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250716550?answerId=251849651022#251849651022
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250716550?answerId=251964281022#251964281022
It went well. I've got 2 machines with all my personal email accounts running Catalina now. Zero loss of email bodies. The only issue I've hit is that I believe Microsoft Teams causes hanging after sleep on both machines. Network activity hangs. Attempting a reboot, you have to usually force quit apps including the Finder. Even then, you wind up having to force shut down the Mac and starting it back up again. It seems as long as I'm not running MS Teams and sleeping those machines, I don't have any issues.
I also lost all my emails in Gmail when upgrading to Catalina a while back (specifically not in the inbox but in the sub-folders). Logged into Gmail itself and emails were nowhere to be found. Years of archived emails lost, was a complete disaster scenario for me.
Hello, I prefer not change for the moment and I'll contact Apple to know if I can move to Catalina 10.15.1. I am waiting for a sincere answer.
AntMacDF, please let us know their answer. Maybe this will show whether they have fixed the Mail upgrade process with 10.15.1.
I did a clean install of Catalina 10.15.1 on November 1 and thousands of emails vanished in the process.
Hi AntMacDF - Were you able to restore your emails from back-up after you downgraded back to Mojave? If so, did you use a back-up made under Catalina or Mojave?
What is worse, is that Apple is selling computers, with flawed-Intel-Core-i9, CPUs, in them, and the price-tag for those, can exceed, $5,000 .
Tell if you succeed to import the manually exported mailboxes. Does this procedure import only emails or account settings/logins as well??
You are right, it is no optimal solution – but I found there all my lost mails!
(I didn't know about this problem before, so I updated... I wouldn't do it again.)
Appreciate your switching. But that does not RECOVER the lost messages.
Yikes. I guess I won't be upgrading to Catalina anytime soon then. This is a pretty serious issue. I'm sorry to hear about your troubles.
Lost mail in OS Catalina upgrade
