how to recover a deleted email

Hi Terryfromoberlin,

Sometimes, while in the Mail app., I have recovered a deleted e-mail by pressing the Command key and the Z key (="Undo") at the same time, immediately after wrongly deleting it, (OR ... "Undo" is in the "Edit" drop-down menu)

(2) You could look in the trash / bin to see if the deleted e-mail is there. (If so ... right click & "Undelete" it)

(3) If you back- up your data regularly, you may have a back-up of the e-mail (eg backed up from from Time Machine to an external Hard Drive).

I believe there may be third-party data-recovery software available, yet I have no experience with any, and do not know how safe and reliable such software may be.

Hope you recover your e-mail ok!

Hi Stegan,

Thank you.

I'm using Big Sur.

Sorry I'm no expert, and have no experience with backed-up e-mails. I have only used Time Machine every few weeks to back-up everything to a portable drive. If I want a back-up file I open the portable drive and rummage around in the "latest" back-up folder for the file I want, then open and save the file to the desktop. Not sure how I'd find e-mails ... "search"ing the portable drive folders didn't reveal a "V7" folder when I looked for it just now.

The Big Sur online User-guide seems useful.:

"Restore items backed up with Time Machine":

https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mh11422/mac

(and there are further links in that advice. )

Hope you find a more useful solution from Apple.

Cheers

Hi brbo,

Good advice for Terryfromoberlin.

Just wondering. Have you recently tried to recover a deleted email using Time Machine? Are you using Catalina or BigSur OSX?

If so, I would be most interested if you can do it in the usual manner - that is, as TM was designed to perform. (finding a previous date on the timeline, highlighting the 'deleted' mail when it was still in the system, and selecting 'restore'.) So many of us can no longer manage to do so without delving into the finder and searching for obscurely named mail folders in the 'V7' folder - a work around out of desperation, as it were.

Please let us know how you get on? Thanks.

Thanks brbo,

You've been most helpful. I see you use TM in your own way. It works for you. One of the most useful features in TM is the 'timeline' where a user can navigate to a previous version of the hard drives contents and retrieve files from the past. Files that may have been deleted?

Hence the button 'restore' which is available. Indeed, as explained in the link you've attached.

And as you've mentioned, locating your V7 folder and retrieving any specific individual email will be a most challenging time!

Do try it sometime? Enter TM whilst you're in Mail and see what comes up?

The user guide is a useful reference - if only TM worked in the stated manner with email. It doesn't any longer. TM with Mail hasn't worked since OSX Mojave. The attached thread explains:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/catalina-10-15-4-and-time-machine.2237262/

Hope that Apple will address this 'bug' in the future.

Thanks again.

Thank you Stegan,

Interesting thread ... read that Apple is aware of the "restore e-mails" problem and expects to rectify it in a later OS version.

.... read that Apple restored someone's lost e-mails through part of the cloud that only they can access.

amongst lots of discussion on this topic.

Will keep in mind opening TM from certain apps allows access to the timeline of files from that app. (if not "Mail" app now)

Cheers.