WhitworthM

Q: Lost mail accounts after OS 10.11 upgrade

Just upgraded to El Capitan on my iMac. All went smoothly BUT when I now run Mail (9.0) all my accounts are missing and all I have is a dialog box asking me to set up new ones. This is catastrophic. How do I restore things apart from reinstalling Yosemite from backup?

 

Thanks.

iMac (27-inch, Late 2012), OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)

Posted on Oct 1, 2015 6:09 AM

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Q: Lost mail accounts after OS 10.11 upgrade

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  • by Paul....,

    Paul.... Paul.... Oct 1, 2015 6:13 AM in response to WhitworthM
    Level 1 (17 points)
    Mac OS X
    Oct 1, 2015 6:13 AM in response to WhitworthM

    Have exactly the same problem - had a number of pop3 based email accounts and local folders all disappear.

     

    Elsewhere there are suggestions about setting the accounts up again, but this only appears to support IMAP - which is no use to me.

  • by Kevind1111,Helpful

    Kevind1111 Kevind1111 Oct 1, 2015 6:22 AM in response to Paul....
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Oct 1, 2015 6:22 AM in response to Paul....

    Same issue, lost all email accounts from Mac Mail...  Will not accept POP email accounts. 

  • by MartinMM,Helpful

    MartinMM MartinMM Oct 1, 2015 6:48 AM in response to WhitworthM
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Oct 1, 2015 6:48 AM in response to WhitworthM

    All the email from my inbox, POP account, has disappeared, and it seems to have set up an imap email account, which I didn't have before, and which is not connected. There doesn't seem to be an option to delete this, so I appear to be stuck with this error. No idea what to do about this.

  • by WhitworthM,

    WhitworthM WhitworthM Oct 1, 2015 6:59 AM in response to MartinMM
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Oct 1, 2015 6:59 AM in response to MartinMM

    Same here. I've been able to reconnect gMail accounts which has resulted in a massive download of stuff most of which I didn't want but my main account which is POP has now been reassigned as an IMAP account and the mailboxes on disk don't load into the Mail program.

  • by WhitworthM,

    WhitworthM WhitworthM Oct 1, 2015 7:15 AM in response to WhitworthM
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Oct 1, 2015 7:15 AM in response to WhitworthM

    The other thing I've noticed is that the V2 folder in Library/Mail is now empty and all the contents are in a V3 folder which didn't exist before. What is the significance of this?

  • by dorusava,

    dorusava dorusava Oct 1, 2015 7:30 AM in response to WhitworthM
    Level 1 (30 points)
    Oct 1, 2015 7:30 AM in response to WhitworthM

    Try to delete MailData folder from username//Library/Mail/V3.

    Mail Application will import again the mailboxes from all your accounts.

    I hope this helps.

  • by WhitworthM,

    WhitworthM WhitworthM Oct 1, 2015 8:21 AM in response to dorusava
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Oct 1, 2015 8:21 AM in response to dorusava

    Unfortunately not. It busied itself but didn't restore all of the messages. My POP account remains screwed. Also, of course, my old mailbox hierarchy has been lost. I understand from this discussion http://tinyurl.com/qhxoq2a that the mailbox arrangements are held in a plist so maybe this needs to be restored?

  • by financialtechnologygroup,

    financialtechnologygroup financialtechnologygroup Oct 1, 2015 8:45 AM in response to WhitworthM
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Mac App Store
    Oct 1, 2015 8:45 AM in response to WhitworthM

    Same thing happened here. All the mailboxes are there but neither Mail.app or System Preferences->Internet Accounts has any record of the old mail accounts, etc.

     

    Have managed to recreate the accounts so I can download new mail and currently going through the painful process of importing all the old mailboxes. Just be aware that this will rapidly use up any remaining disk space as it creates a new copy of any old mails.

  • by financialtechnologygroup,

    financialtechnologygroup financialtechnologygroup Oct 1, 2015 8:47 AM in response to financialtechnologygroup
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Mac App Store
    Oct 1, 2015 8:47 AM in response to financialtechnologygroup

    Curiously I also found I had no Contacts entries although I did have Calendar ones. I'm guessing something got messed up with iCloud. Having logged out and back in again (via System Preferences->iCloud) I have most things now in sync but hasn't resolved any Mail.app issues or related accounts.

  • by Kevind1111,

    Kevind1111 Kevind1111 Oct 1, 2015 9:11 AM in response to financialtechnologygroup
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Oct 1, 2015 9:11 AM in response to financialtechnologygroup

    Managed to recreate all the mailbox filing I had by re-importing them all.  Still got an issue sending mail from my main email account.

  • by Kevind1111,

    Kevind1111 Kevind1111 Oct 1, 2015 9:17 AM in response to Kevind1111
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Oct 1, 2015 9:17 AM in response to Kevind1111

    Email now seems to be working, may not have been update related

  • by Eddie Ski,

    Eddie Ski Eddie Ski Oct 1, 2015 12:00 PM in response to WhitworthM
    Level 1 (25 points)
    Oct 1, 2015 12:00 PM in response to WhitworthM

    FWIW, I didn't lose any accounts as much as it duplicated yahoo accounts (paid, not free) with icon of Yahoo mail next to them. I was able to delete these but was careful as there were duplicates. Only way I realized this was that the original email accounts were logged in. The Yahoo duplicates, once selected, would ask for credentials.

     

    Did you have backup?

    Did you find original V2 mailboxes and import?

  • by Kevind1111,

    Kevind1111 Kevind1111 Oct 1, 2015 1:12 PM in response to Eddie Ski
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Oct 1, 2015 1:12 PM in response to Eddie Ski

    My mailbox were in the V3 file structure under the Mailboxes file, subset of mail.mbox, simply imported each folder and it rebuilt the filing system, had to make sure i pulled in all sub folders as well..

  • by Bob Ryan,

    Bob Ryan Bob Ryan Oct 1, 2015 1:27 PM in response to WhitworthM
    Level 1 (65 points)
    Oct 1, 2015 1:27 PM in response to WhitworthM

    I lost my ability to send emails from my iCloud account, only.  They would go into the Outbox, then when asking for password upon attempting to send I got the"Unable to Validate" response. Re-entering the correct settings in the Mail preferences did nothing.  I ended up replacing/restoring the accounts preference file in the V2 folder of MailData in the Library folder with the one from yesterday via Time Machine. That worked for me.

     

    Otherwise all seems fine.

     

    iMac 27, Mid 2011 up from Yosemite. 

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