I accidentally deleted all my emails. Can Time Machine restore them?

If you are trying to restore the Mail program, you will get that response. Try opening the program, select a mailbox, and then enter Time Machine to attempt a restore. Before trying this, if there are currently any e-mails in that mailbox, go Mail/Mailbox/Export Mailbox to save the existing ones.

If that doesn't work, go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Select Library/Mail. You can look for your missing e-mails in that folder while in Time Machine.

Neither one worked. Going thru finder - seemed to go a little further - but then nothing was in the folder that I restored? I did notice that right after I seemed to have lost all the emails - I had 5,000 plus email in the trash. I have been able to recover what I remember would be important. I was in the process of deleting emails, I didn't need - when I got this message - are you sure you want to delete 4,000 plus archived emails and I said yes - that's when everything disappeared. I guess I won't do that again.??

Thanks for your advice

Yes it can; it restored mine from time to time.

Go to your email pages, then open Time machine. It should open with a rather narrowed version of the page but decipherable all the same.

Once the grey time scale appears, scroll up until you reach the approximate date or the date of the missing mail. Highlight the mail then click restore.

Clearly it could be a long job to do all of them and I don't think there is a form of consolidated restoration.

Message was edited by: seventy one

I am not able to restore my emails. I get an message "mail can't be modified or deleted because it is required by OSX

You are welcome.