Recover corrupted draft in Apple Mail

OSX 10.14.6, Mail 12.4

An email I have been working on for weeks (and saving religiously) has suddenly corrupted itself;

it is blank
the View/Message gives no options (all greyed out)
Rebuilding Drafts achieved nothing
when I look in Time Machine, it and all/most of the other drafts return "not cached" and are blank. Which is a surprise. Perhaps it shouldn't be.

It is going to be incredibly difficult and time-consuming to recreate this email, so if anyone has a solution I would be deeply grateful.

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.14

Posted on May 17, 2020 4:30 PM

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3 replies

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,852 points

May 17, 2020 4:47 PM in response to MatthewRoscoe

Go to Folder: ~/Library/Mail/V6

You'll have several folders with unique IDs for names. Open each and see if you can determine which one is the account you are looking for.

Find the Drafts.mbox and open it.

You may have to dig down into several folders deep to find any .emlx files. If you do, ctrl-click on it and Open With Text Edit. I don't have Mojave installed, so I can't walk you down the folder hierarchy.

If the draft is stored there, you may be able to dig out the text of the email from the .eml file. There will be lots of extra stuff to wade through, but you might be able to extract the text of the body.

May 17, 2020 6:05 PM in response to Barney-15E

But when I trawled back through TimeMachine in that directory I found a not-too-old copy!

Thanks for the inspiration!

May 17, 2020 5:07 PM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks, but it is not there as far as I can see. There are a lot but I've eyeballed them all.

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Recover corrupted draft in Apple Mail