Lost mail rules when upgrading to ML, can't restore from time machine

It is exactly the same that happened to me. I am dying without my rules. I have rules that I have been making for years!!!!! HELPPPPPPPPP

Same thing happened to me as well. Not only is the rules gone, I lost all my signatures as well. It's really annoying since my Inbox gets 4x the mail since the rules are screening them out. I hope there is a quick fix to this.

I am also having the same issue. I have built rules for a while now to manage all the mail that I receive on a daily basis. This is definitely a hiccup but things could be worse.

Holy bytes of Apple!

How do I restore the rules?

I need my rules!

Hey Apple...you listening?!

Steve would have had a conniption over this.

Umm...this is weird. Now my rules appeared out of thin air. I did absolutely nothing...zero tweaking.

Very strange. Very cool!

Guess Steve is still getting it done!

Me too.

Looking in the Mail folder (Library/Mail/V2/MailData) showed that the MessageRules.plist and backup files were included with the new Mountain Lion files, and still with earlier dates than "Today" when I installed Mountain Lion.

Property List Editor confirmed that all the rules were intact.

As they're already there in the right folder, there doesn't seem much point in restoring any files from Time Machine.

However, quitting Mail and relaunching it apparently made the Rules reappear, without doing anything to the files. Try it (perhaps more than once).

So after a little poking around I found that my rules were still intact in the ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/MessageRules.plist file. The problem is that Mail is pulling from a new .plist called SyncedRules.plist. I have relaunched Mail. Rebooted the machine. Nothing restores the Rules. I am hesitant to copy the rules over since there might be other files that need updating as well. For the moment, I will continue to try and figure out how to merge the original MessageRules.plist into the SyncedRules.plist. I imagine it has everythign to do with iCloud and having the Rules EVERYWHERE!!

Hi,

I opened the SyncedRules-plist in an editor and it seems we found the problem.

I'm not an actuall programmer, but SyncedFilesInfo.plist lists the files SyncedRules.plist, allSignatures.plist and SyncedSmartFolders.plist and I think 10.8 connects and syncs these files with iCloud-Accounts.

So I compared the .plist files "messageRules" and "SyncedRules" by creating an example-rule. It should look for a string in the sender-field and then delete this matched mails. Now there are a few new meta-keys in the 10.8 rule: "SendNotification" is probably for Notification Center and "Version" looks like autosave stuff. But also there is no more "Active"-key, so I don't know, how Mail recognizes, which rules are active and which are not.

So far I tried to insert an old rule of Lion from my messageRules.plist, added the new Keys and deleted the Active-Key into SyncedRules.plist and started Mail again, but it deleted my old rule immediately. There are some UniqueIDs, perhaps that's the problem.

I hope apple is going to fix this in the next update, because this is just ********. At leat there should be some kind of migration-tool. I wonder why there hasn't been a shitstorm yet.

Sorry for my bad english, I'm working on it. But I hope I could help somehow.

OK i thought i was going crazy here and something happened retrieving my data back from TimeMachine, but it seems you guys tackled the problem already.

Had the same problem; what solved it for me was to fix an access problem with the iCloud account (wrong user name).

Didn't last very long, unfortunately. After re-starting Mail, the rules were gone again ;-{

I called Apple Support and was told that Apple was aware of this "bug". Their suggestion was to replace my mail folder with a backup copy. I still do not have any rules after restarting mail using the backup folder. The rules are clearly in my plist, but not recognized by Mail.

Apple Support informed me that the rules are gone and have to be created from scratch. That is total BS and I'm very disappointed. No upgrade should cause you to lose data. I'll have to go through my MessageRules.plist and figure out what rules I had and recreate them. Total BS.

My rules are still there, so perhaps Apple support speak with resource forked tongue.

Comparing an old (pre ML) rules file from 20th June with the ML one, the differences are:

The file name was: MessageRules.plist, the ML one is SynchedRules.plist. Both are in my V2 folder, but the old Rules have been copied (by Mail, not me) into the new SynchedRules file.

In the old file, for each item (Rule) the first line was Active (Key) String (Type) 1 (Value). In the ML file, this line is no longer there, so the first line is AllCriteriaMustBeSatisfied.

You can see these differnces in the "preview" part of Finder Show Info, if you have the two files to compare.

Thus, just copying and renaming the old Rules file probably won't work, because of this difference. Mail probably just makes a new file because the copied file isn't as expected. It should be possible to edit the old plist file to remove the "Active" line, and rename it to SynchedRules.plist (but see below). The top is slightly different, just below <dict>, as this relates to the Active line. There are a couple of lines at the bottom that aren't in the new file.

The "Active" line that has gone is now in a file called RulesActiveState.plist. This file is just a list of RuleIds from the SynchedRules.plist (like this:

AC6F6611-FF61-4AA6-9682-BA100EFAC233)

Doing this does sound rather tedious, but might be quicker than manually re-entering blocked email addresses etc. to replicate old rules. As plist files are in xml format, it should be possible to use a text editor to delete the unwanted "Active" line from the message rules list by Find & Replace All (with nothing). All this could then be copied to the "SynchedRules.plist. You would need to copy the RuleIds into the RulesActiveState.plist as well.

Make a copy of the files first just in case...

This did not work for me. The old rules are automatically deleted from SyncedRules.plist and RulesActiveState doesn't seem to care which IDs i add to it.

Cannot believe there isn't a working solution for this bug!