Lost mail accounts after OS 10.11 upgrade

Hi Bubba_jr, how did you import from that route (Re-imported from ~/Library/Mail/V3/*account*/*box*) as I can see the library folder at all when trying to import.

Thank you

I had all my sent messages disappear in Mail after updating to El Capitan. Both POP and IMAP. Eventually, one email account returned, but not the others. Even when sending a message, the message did not stay in the Sent Messages folder more than one day. Then it disappeared. When I looked at my Mail Preferences Accounts, I discovered many of them had lost their password, or the Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP), and many no longer had the "Enable this Account" box checked. But when I checked that box, it duplicated Accounts.

I contacted Apple Support, and after being connected with a couple senior advisors, was asked to send a data dump file to them so the Engineers could have a look at what was happening.

Now I have wiped the drive and reinstalled Yosemite (from a TimeMachine backup), and Mail is fine again.

I realize things can go wrong. But it seems El Capitan is not ready for public release yet. (I was a beta tester for Snow Leopard - now that was a nice, fast, OS!)

I lost several (but not all) IMAP accounts. In the end I recreated the accounts and deleted the old ones.

In one case Apple Mail decided to load all 5000 messages again, for the others it was happy to find the old messages again. Good thing I used IMAP.

Talk about a messy upgrade. Disappointed, Apple!

Worse, my calendar connection to Zimbra is broken and I cannot recreate it - I get a "Unable to verify account name or password" error. Apple seems to blame this on Zimbra but the calendar link (via CalDAV) worked fine in Yosemite.

Did you notice that the layout of the edit window in Apple Mail changed as well? The "send" button has moved, which is very annoying for my muscle memory.

Did you notice that the layout of the edit window in Apple Mail changed as well? The "send" button has moved, which is very annoying for my muscle memory.

You can customize the tool bar under View and arrange it as you like. That might help your muscle memory......

~B

I know - but there are two menu bars, one with the send button and one with the formats:

I cannot add "send" to the format bar or collapse both menu bars into one. Looks like Apple sacrificed usability for perceived beauty.

I finally upgraded by Mac Mini to El Capitan today.

A few hours later and all my original missing email accounts were added from iCloud albeit set to be inactive.

I then deleted them all as they had been replaced although the new ones weren't created either automatically or by hand.

Later on I noticed my MacBook Pro has suddenly lost all the SMTP settings for the new accounts I had created (with a different description but the same settings as the ones I had just deleted). The POP accounts remained.

Curiously when I first had the problems Mail.app->Connection Doctor kept trying to access the old SMTP accounts even though System Preferences->Internet Accounts and Mail.app->Preferences->Accounts were no longer showing them.

I have absolutely no idea what is going on but whomever is responsible for synchronising the accounts, and the SMTP side of things in particular, really needs to get on top of this problem.

After updating to El Capitan I opened Mail. I was used to Mail telling me it had to rebuild the database. This time it didn't and all mailboxes were empty. Mail recognized all my mailboxes and subfolders, but not the existing mails, except for IMAP, IMAP worked fine, but the POP mailboxes had only the last three weeks redownloaded. They old mails were there, in ~/Library/Mail/V3.

So: I threw away the folder MailData, restarted and Mail rebuild all mailboxes to the state before the update, including subfolders and rules. I understand you manually re-imported all mailboxes, but this worked perfectly for me.

Similar issue but not exactly the same. After I upgraded, my e-mail account is working fine but all my old e-mails in my inbox are gone. Any thoughts how to get them back? Thanks for any help.

Quit Mail. Delete or move to desktop all files in ~/Library/Mail/V3. Manually drag all files from the V2 folder from the latest Time Machine backup into the V3 folder in ~/Library/Mail Delete the MailData folder and open Mail. It should give the 'Update the database'-screen and you are done. Maybe you could let do it Time Machine for you, but you still have to delete the MailData folder. If there is a V2 folder remaining delete the MailData folder in it as well.

I also noticed 'Mail' was not checked in my iCloud preferences in System Preferences after the update. Maybe that's the beginning of the problem?

Just upgraded to 10.11.1 and all my carefully recreated local mailboxes are now showing up as 'recovered mail'. This is getting ridiculous.

After talking with Apple support (Senior Engineers), I have reverted back to OS X 10.10.5 Yosemite. I will wait until El Capitan is fixed. I don't have time nor interest trying to make it work. When "It just works" works, then I'll try updating again.

El Capitan isn't broken, the upgrade process is.

Looks like part of the problem I had game from mail providers not upgrading the security as required by El Capitan.

After complaining to my provider (GMX) they seem to have fixed their security settings, now IMAP works again. Overall I am very happy now with El Capitan.