Rebuild Mailbox - deleted all my emails

Question

Level 1

5 points

Rebuild Mailbox - deleted all my emails

Hello all - I'm desperately hoping you can help me.

I have seemingly lost three years of archived emails that were stored 'On My Mac' in Mail.app

I have a mailbox (stored 'On My Mac') called Archive where I store all my read emails. I selected this mailbox and clicked 'Rebuild' in the Mailbox menu.

All my emails then disappeared.

I cannot find them anywhere on my hard drive. They also don't seem to have been backed up in my (twice weekly) Time Machine backups.

Any help you can give me will be hugely appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Posted on Dec 6, 2013 7:01 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 6, 2013 7:40 AM in response to kb!!!

Hi, i had a similar problem (few folders were empty, also on the HD).

i think it (disapperaing of mails) happened during the upgrade to Mavericks because since then these folders are empty (checked via TM, better view in TM backups via Back-In-Time).

But: I had to copy the mail folder manually from the TM HD on my Mac and import the folders into Mail.app. It was not possible to restore from the backup (still not visible or so).

I think there is a big bus in indexing mails and in a certain case Mail.app delete the mails because I was testing by copying a mail in such an empty folder.

I imported the mails in a new created folder.

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Answer 2

kb!!! Author

Level 1

5 points

Dec 6, 2013 7:41 AM in response to CT

Thanks - I've found some of the emails in my Time Machine back up (discovered how to find these by opening Time Machine while in Mail), but still lost everything since my last back up a week ago...

Any idea why rebuilding the mailbox would have deleted all the emails?

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Answer 3

Mar 10, 2014 3:32 PM in response to kb!!!

emails are safe inside ~/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes/ thats what you have under On My Mac, I did a Rebuild of all my mailboxes and everything turn blanck, after looking inside Mailboxes found that on the root of each .mbox the folder inside had added .noindex to all the folders I Rebuild, after taking that out and rebuilding everything came back, just make sure you dont edit anything inside the Mailbox while mail is open.

Hope this helps.

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Answer 4

Washit

Level 1

16 points

Mar 25, 2014 8:22 PM in response to federico exa

I need to do this but I don't understand what you are saying about the root of each .mbox ?? You said to take something out... ".noindex" ?? I don't understnad? Can you be more clear? I lost over 24K emails and I need them back desparately!!

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Answer 5

Mar 25, 2014 11:06 PM in response to Washit

Hi Washit,

you do see that the structure inside ~/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes/ is the same as the folders inside Apple Mail?

look for the same folder inside the Library where your email disapeard and your going to see a folder with a name like this D9260F12-B465-4B3C-BFEB-601A12FB012C.noindex edit the name of the folder by taking off .noindex you should have something like this D9260F12-B465-4B3C-BFEB-601A12FB012C after that rebuild the folder, if done right you will see all the email inside that folder.

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Answer 6

tobyyo

Level 1

8 points

May 13, 2016 8:42 AM in response to federico exa

This has happened to me, all my “On My Mac” mailboxes are empty. I found the folders with the .noindex suffix in my ~/Library/Mail/ folder. Quit Mail, removed the .noindex suffix and then restarted Mail.

Still no mail in the mailboxes!

Click Mailbox > Rebuild...

Nothing happens.

Check the ~/Library/Mail/ folder again. All those folders have .noindex suffixes added to them again?

It appears Apple Mail does not want to index them at all!?

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