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)
I'm reviving this discussion as I've run into problems again after a long-delayed upgrade from OS 10.11 to 10.12, long delayed because I was afraid it would screw up my emails again. It did.
The upgrade to 10.12.5 went smoothly but when I ran Mail for the first time I got an error message and an offer to reimport mailboxes and messages, which I clicked and which happened. Problem was that the imported messages only went up to late 2015. Nothing since.
I spent a fruitless 30 minutes on the phone to the Apple help service (very useful sometimes - long may it continue) at which point the line dropped. I don't think the service agent understood what was going on. From there I took things into my own hands and reimported all the mailboxes from a current (SuperDuper) backup - labourious, but I think all the messages were restored. Mail seems to be working fine now.
This is similar to the problems I had when I upgraded from 10.10 to 10.11 but Mail worked well after I'd sorted that, until yesterday's upgrade. I have to assume that the earlier upgrade introduced a problem in the structure of the Mail setup. After the earlier upgrade I found two folders within Library/Mail, V2 and V3, and I was never sure which was the currently active one. After yesterday's upgrade there were V2 and V4, V3 having disappeared. The mailboxes I reimported from backup and which had the up-to-date messages came from the pre-update V2 folder.
It would be nice to think that things will be all fine and dandy when it comes to another OS update but I am sure that that won't be the case. I would like to be able to find someone at Apple who can understand what has happened and if there is a proper fix but so far that's not been the case.
Helpful guy at my local Apple Store suggested that next time I upgrade I should wipe my hd, reinstall the OS from scratch and then restore data from Time Machine. He said he always does that when upgrading. Maybe sensible to do that to clear out all the accumulated gunk.
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.
Same issue, lost all email accounts from Mac Mail... Will not accept POP email accounts.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Email now seems to be working, may not have been update related
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?
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..
Lost mail accounts after OS 10.11 upgrade
