where is my mail folder in time machine?

They are backed up. To find them > Click on your mail icon > Inbox > and once you have the screen showing, go to Time machine icon and click that. Wait a moment or so and then the screen will allow you to go back to previous mail inbox dates. The system works with sent mails and other subsections too. It does not work with Junk mail.

So pleased to read all is working well now. Thank you for the star.

Happy New Year,

71.

Your mail is stored in

~/Library/Mail

You can look in the Mailboxes folder to see the various ".mbox" folders, inside each of which is a Messages folder containing the individual mail messages (the ".emlx" files).

To find the corresponding data in your Time Machine drive you have to drill down a little deeper. Open the top level window for the Time machine drive. You should see a folder called "Backups.backupdb". Drilling down, your mail is in:

Backup.backupdb/computer_name/2014-12-31-164634/computer_name/Users/user_name/Li brary/Mail

Naturally, you'll need to substitute the correct "computer_name" and "user_name" on your system. And, of course, the date/time I show above ("2014-12-31-164634") is an example from my system. But at that directory level there will be a date/time directory created for each Time Machine backup.

HTH,

B.

It is highly unusual that your Mail does not appear in your Library folder. Somehow, it would seem that you've told the Mail application to store the mail in a non-standard location.

Ok, the first thing is to make sure we're talking about the same "Library" folder. You have at least two. One is at the root of your startup drive, and is the Library folder for the whole system. The other is user-specific, and belongs to you, but is inaccessible to other users on the Mac (of which there may be none).

From a unix file system perspective the two Library folders (directories) exist in these two places:

/Library

/Users/user_name/Library

Your Mail folder should be in the second one. If it's truly not there, then you could find it by opening the Terminal application and run the following command:

mdfind -name Outbox.mbox

That should show you where Mail's outbox is, and therefore where your Mail folder is. Once you know that location, you can then check your Time Machine drive, using the instructions I provided in my previous post, to find and confirm that Time Machine is backing up your mail.

B.

I do use Time Machine but if something were to happen to the HD my backup would be gone. With iPhoto you can back up your library to cloud storage of your choice - my question is can you do that with Mail?

Thank you so much! 🙂

Only if you forward all you e-mails to your iCloud e-mail address. You should have more than one backup. Get another external drive and you can use a clone for the 2nd backup.

Clone - Carbon Copy Cloner (Often recommended as it has more features than some others)

Clone – Data Backup

Clone – Deja Vu

Clone - SuperDuper

Clone - Synk

Clone Software – 6 Applications Tested

Commonly Used Backup Methods

Hi, i just follow this and i cant find my emails on time machine. I delete my email account and i want to find some old emails on the time machine.

In the time machine Under HD / User / My User / I don't have a Library directory

In HD / System / Library / I don't have a Mail directory

In HD / Library / I don't have a Mail directory

I use mail inbox / time machine I only get the current mails no matter what date I choose.

Where are they? How can i get all my old inbox?

THANK YOU!! I recently switched an account from POP to IMAP and it deleted all the sent messages on my laptop for the past 2 years in that particular account. I was surprised that when I searched my time machine with a key word, it didn't find messages so I thought they were gone forever. Your solution found them immediately. Such a relief! At least I know if I need to find something sent in the past I can go this route to try to find it. Do you know if I can search for something specific once I'm looking at the backup of the sent folder?

Excellent answer, searched web all day with no luck, this answer helped me in seconds, thank you, life saver!