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

In MessageRules.plist (Snow Leopard) from 21st June, when opened in Text Edit, the start of an individual rule looks like:

In SyncedRules.plist (ML), today the identical rule starts:

(the grid appears here when copied from Text Edit)

so the first two lines need to go (There're at the bottom of the rule in ML).

The same rule ends (old SL file)

and the new one:

Note change from <string> to <integer> and the added two lines, which seem to be a new version of the two that were at the top of the older rule, also with a change from <string> to <integer>. The "1" in this seems to be the same in all rules.

This alteration should be fairly easy to do, using Find & Replace, if done in the right order.

I swear I did exactly that, and Mail ignored it, but this time it worked!

Also, for whatever reason, my TimeStamp keys were already set to integer in my old SL .plist.

Rules are fixed! Woo hooo! Thank you Karabuni!

Next up, doing the same for Smart Mailboxes, and Signatures 🙂

Still not working for me. I thought I messed up with the integer/string blocks, but I didn't.

Apple - It just works...not 😟

So I have to setup my rules all over again.

Done! All Rules, Smart Mailboxes & Signatures all now restored from Lion to Mountain Lion!

To sum up the manual process:

1. Quit Mail 🙂
2. Mail Rules; as mentioned by Karabuni above:
   1. copy manually from ~Library/Mail/V2/MailData/MessageRules.plist all <dict> entries under root node "rules" to ~Library/Mail/V2/MailData/SyncedRules.plist,
   2. remove the Active key & string
   3. ensure TimeStamp value is integer (not string).
3. SmartMailboxes; similar to above:
   1. manually copy <dict> entries from ~Library/Mail/V2/MailData/SmartMailboxes.plist to ~Library/Mail/V2/MailData/SyncedSmartMailboxes.plist
   2. ensure you copy into in the "mailboxes" array (2nd array in my SmartMailboxes.plist).
4. Signatures; a little more involved:
   1. open ~Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Signatures, then open SignaturesByAccount.plist and copy all <dict> entries in the AllSignaturesKey array. Paste that into the array in AllSignatures.plist.
   2. Next Open AccountsMap.plist and copy the SignaturesUniqueID <string> (ex: <string>2487A222-2ECF-43CF-AFE8-6FB0F400C1F6</string>) into the Signatures array for the account you want the Signature assigned to. That will get the entries to appear in the Preferences, but no content if adding to a mail.
   3. Open all .webarchive files in ~Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Signatures in Safari and copy the content of each 1 by 1 into Preferences->Signatures (copy and paste into the corresponding signature).

Hope this helps!!

@stoikr

Follow the steps and you'll be fine; you DO NOT HAVE TO SETUP ALL RULES again.

As to your criticism... ok, they missed this one for some people, but isn't it still true that most things Apple "just work"?

Let's put this into context: Apple has succeeded with an approx. 99% seamless transition to Mountain Lion for most users, an upgrade that adds hundreds of new features, increases feature parity with mobile devices, etc. and yes they missed less than 1% of bugs...

Don't you think it a little unreasonable to expect it to be 100%? If not, do you expect the same exacting performance from yourself in your work? 🙂

I just used BBEDIT to print the file at (Library/Mail/V2/MailData) (the plist file). Then I looked through it for my 15 rules and since 7 no longer apply (chaff) I just re-created the remaining 8 manually. Yes, this is a pain in the rear but this was quicker. Thank goodness I didn't lose my sigs. I usually title my rules with what the rule does, example:

FORWARD somemail@somedomain.com TO anothermail@anotherdomain.com [STOP]

This tells me what the rule does and that it stops evaluating after the rule is executed. Doesn't always work if there are a lot of conditions, etc. but in this case it worked just fine. Is it just me or does it seem that the rules for the iCloud accounts work OKAY? I don't use iCloud on my primary email and the rules were lost.

I also found my rules were blank when I migrated from Lion to Mountain Lion. Given I have over seventy rules, recreating them by hand would have been nightmarish. Here's the steps I followed to restore my missing rules:

1. Be sure Mail is _not_ running.

2. Copy ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/MessageRules.plist to ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/SyncedRules.plist.txt

3. Edit SyncedRules.plist using a _text editor_.

4. Delete the following lines from below the "<plist version="1.0">" line:

<dict>

<key>rules</key>

5. Delete the following lines from above the "</plist>" line at the end of the file (your integer value will almost certainly be different than '999'); be sure not to delete the "</plist>" line at the end of the file:

<key>version</key>

<integer>999</integer>

</dict>

6. You will now need to adjust the indenting of the plist to account for the deletions you've made. We can use plutil to do this for us. From the Terminal, run the following command (this should be _one_long_line_):

plutil -convert xml1 ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/SyncedRules.plist.txt ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/SyncedRules.plist

7. Start mail.

8. Your mail rules should now be restored, except all will be marked inactive. You will have to re-activate them by going into Mail's preferences (Command-,), clicking the 'Rules' button in the toolbar, and then clicking the checkbox to the left of every rule. If you have a bunch of rules, this is made easier by clicking the first rule to highlight it, and then alternating between pressing space and the down arrow on your keyboard to check the checkboxes for each mail rule.

9. Once everything works, feel free to delete ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/SyncedRules.plist.txt .

Hope this helps.

This is very strange since neither solution worked for me not the one by Karabuni or that of SolomonFord, but nonetheless thanks for your input.

Strange thing is that the timestamp from MessageRules.plist in my case was already an integer and not a string.

[edit]

Now i see why timestamp is integer and not string.

I did an update from Lion to Mountain Lion and not from Snow Leopard. Even did a clean install and then retrieved the data back from my TimeMachine backup.

[/edit]

After trying all of the above and several similar suggestions, what worked for me was to remove the SyncedFilesInfo.plist file. I should note that my problem occurred when I signed out of my iCloud account.

Keeping files open in TextWrangler revealed that backups were erased on mail launch, so I presumed it had something to do with a cached file or account settings. After running YASU and some other utilities with no positive results, I was about to delete accounts and start over on mail (I have a lot of rules). I noticed that the file mentioned above was being modified on startup so I peaked inside it and sure enough it had a number or iCloud references. I removed it, launched mail and all back to normal. I had alread replace my signatures, but I bet it would have restored them as well. But rules and smart mailboxes were all back to normal.

Hope this helps others.

Thanks to SolomonFord and michael.bigley I now also have recovered all the rules I had built in several months.

Only, the correction of the indenting SolomonFord suggests is not necessary. In XML indentation is not an issue.

It is a shame that this is the second blunder Apple made regarding the Mail App. They removed the RSS-reader without any notice and all the feeds were just gone. 😠

I switched from Windows to Apple last year and I was very happy about it, but now I don't know how I am going to tell this stupid mistake to all the people I am trying to convince to switch to Mac OSX as well. 😕

Again thanks to michael.bigley. I have try many times to recreate manually the SyncedRules.plist to no avail since it was replaced by the previous version. The deletion of SyncedFilesInfo.plist has done the trick. I just have to activate all the rules. Thanks again

SolomonFord's solution worked for me, but I had to tweak it slightly.

Instead of (note bold) --

plutil -convert xml1 ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/SyncedRules.plist.txt ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/SyncedRules.plist

I found that I needed to use --

plutil -convert xml1 ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/SyncedRules.plist ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/SyncedRules.plist

Without removing the .txt extension, the terminal command returned an error.

@Brian

There is no need to convert the XML. The layout-change is just for humans useful. As I pointed out earlier, XML does not care about indentation.

Hey, thanks for figuring this out. I gave it a try, but a new SyncedFilesInfo.plist keeps getting generated, possibly through iCloud syncing. I tried even just deleting the code for syncing the SyncedRules.plist from the SyncedFilesInfo plist, but this again got overwritten. I can turn of iCloud syncing of Mail, but then that gets rid of my iCloud mail account altogether. I guess that they really are forcing me to update all of my computers to MountainLion so that things can be synced across. LAME. I got a new computer that came with ML, but am not ready to prep my older computers for the update (they are on SL). In the meantime, it would be nice to have my Mail Rules working, especially since I have just spend a couple hours trying to follow the directions above (which I think are good, but just keep getting undone by "syncing").

Apple Fail.

@eball,

Maybe turn off your Airport card so that you can make edits offline?