Q: Cannot see my mail in other folders/mailboxes I created. They disappeared!  Says NO MAIL

I too had this problem, it happend yesterday around noon. No idea what triggered it, but I know that it is happening to other people, message boards are peppered with strings of postss about this. Restarts and PRAM clearing didn't help me at all, nor did a mailbox rebuild. In other discussoins here, I see information about more techincal solutions, but they intimidate me, worried I will make matters worse.

I have good news to report, but I suspect it won't help everyone who is having this problem.  But a few months ago, I bought an Apple Time Capsule and started using Time Machine (TM). It is a totally invisible operation, I more or less forgot that the Time Machine backups were happening, and I never really understood how they work. It turns out it is very easy to use. Well of course it is, Apple designed it!

But I went in to the TM view of my backups, and chose one from mid-morning, which I believe was before the moment when my mailboxes went missing. Since I had my Mail Viewer Window open, TM seemed to know that I was looking for a backup of just that program's data, because it showed a small text box letting me know that it was installing the backup for my inbox. It took a little while, not sure, but at least ten minutes, maybe more, but when I came back to my computer, everything was there, exactly as it had been before the problem. Frankly I do not know if TM replaced other things on my computer with the mid-morning version. After doing a Check Mail, all my incoming mail was in place. The one thing I lost were my Sent mails in the short period between mid-morning and when I did this TM fix.

So my Time Capsule and Time Machine paid off big-time for me yesterday. And now I would recommend that system to anyone who, like me, is not a huge computer geek, but who has huge amounts of data that they depend on.

Of course, for anyone who is suffereing this bizarre problem, and who perhaps doesn't use Time Machine (I didn't until very recently), I hope you find another solution. Maybe looking thru you rmore traditional backup systems and finding a recent backup that  you can somehow meld in to your current Mail inbox.

Peter

I was going to post my thoughts on this in other discussion threads, and then found this fix. I have no idea if it would have helped me, since I did the Time Machine backup fix. But this would have been MUCH easier. Maybe it will help you.

If you look at your Mail Viewer Window, on the left side is where y our inbox and sent mail folders are, and after the listing for Smart mailboxes, there is "On My Mac." If you hover your pointer over those words, to the right appears the word "Hide" or "Show." If the word is "show", click on that, and voila (fingers crossed) all your mailboxes reappear.

Of oourse, this may not be at all your problem, and maybe it was not my problem. But if "hide" was inadvertently clicked at some point, it would create the same situatoin, where it seems like all those folders went poof. And the phrase "On My Mac" is not a very obvious indicator of where things got buried. At least it wasn't for me.

Again, hope this helps....

Peter