Power loss, Mail accounts gone, "Welcome to Mail" splash screen

I don't have a suggest on the mail problem. But using the system until it is at Zero battery, or even below 10% battery life is just foolish. As you have now found out. Especially since AC power was what a minute or 2 away, or even right next to where you were using the notebook.

Good Luck getting your mail straightened out.

I think it was an exceptional event.

It should not have happened, but you have a Time Machine backup so use it. A week's worth of lost data, if you lost even that much, is a small price to pay. If Mail could not decipher its preferences or mailboxes it probably created new ones, resulting in what you see.

Clearing caches and executing maintenance scripts could not have helped. Before you resort to a full TM restoration though, try merely copying your user Library/Mail folder. That will probably restore your mailboxes and their contents and rebuild an appropriate .plist file. However, given the fact your SSD was apparently scrambled you may have other challenges to address.

Edit: I see you found the folders, good job. Make sure everything else is intact before resuming regular Time Machine backups.

Message was edited by: John Galt

Thank you, thank you, thank you . . . This tip worked like magic and saved me very much trouble. The preference files evidently got corrupted when I had a very brief interruption in the power supply to my MacBook Air.

I had the same problem but replacing the two files from a time machine backup made no difference. Mail would welcome me as if it was a new installation and all accounts would be gone.

I got it working by only restoring the accounts.plist file, then it worked fine for me.

Thanks for your help.

This might help... looks to be a TM issue:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3303397?answerId=16179035022#16179035022

Brilliant. Restoring com.apple.mail.plist is the usual recommendation, but that did nothing for me. OTOH, my ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Accounts.plist was only 1kb, and restoring that did the trick.

Now I need to do some drive diagnostics. There's no way this file should have been corrupted regardless of power outage or crash. The OS is journaled.

Just to say that this happened to me as well, on my iMac (Mountain Lion), after a power cut.

I had tried deleting com.apple.mail.plist but as jfaughnan found, that did nothing.

Thank god for Time Machine (and your solution, sdedalus!)

hi, was the mail account settings the only thing you lost. I lost my dock settings as well eg it now only shows the native icons and not the ones i've added such as photoshop.

Graham.

I had the same problem, but not caused by a power failure. Mail hung up, I quit normally, and relaunched Mail, only to face a box requesting that I install a mail account. When I cancelled, Mail would quit automatically. There were no messages in the background. All Internet Accounts under System Prefs were intact. Restoring the same two files (~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist and ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Accounts.plist) from a Timemachine backup resolved the issue. I did not delete the original files before restoring but renamed them with an underscore in the first position. Interestingly restoring the entire ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData did NOT work. Also, following the rescue, links to replies and to forwarded messages in Mail were broken. However links to messages in Omnifocus and the tags assigned by Mailtags4 were preserved.

MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2011)

2.2 GHz Intel Core i7

Yosemite 10.10.2

It worked. I love you.

This worked for me as well after I encountered a similar issue following a crash that resulted in a reboot. Thank you! I'm so glad I had a backup from a few weeks ago!

Worked like a charm. My MBP mid2009, Yosemite with failed battery, it's sleep overnight with portable HDD attached. The battery drained two days later and when It wake up, Mail app ask me to add new account with all mail gone.

I'm so lucky to found this thread. I restored from Time machine 2 file as mentioned in other replies, Mail came back alive. Thank you.

Apple must takes this problem seriously, such caused panic and hard to find the exact solution.

Hi!

I've had the same problem, but I don't have those files in my computer or in any time machine back up... I don't even have a Mail folder in ~/Library/

Any idea of what's going on?

Thanks!