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 Terrell Smith,

    Terrell Smith Terrell Smith Oct 5, 2015 7:43 PM in response to WhitworthM
    Level 4 (3,020 points)
    Oct 5, 2015 7:43 PM in response to WhitworthM

    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!)

  • by sknop,

    sknop sknop Oct 6, 2015 2:08 AM in response to Terrell Smith
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Oct 6, 2015 2:08 AM in response to Terrell Smith

    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.

  • by Bob Ryan,

    Bob Ryan Bob Ryan Oct 6, 2015 7:12 AM in response to sknop
    Level 1 (65 points)
    Oct 6, 2015 7:12 AM in response to sknop

    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



  • by sknop,

    sknop sknop Oct 6, 2015 7:45 AM in response to Bob Ryan
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Oct 6, 2015 7:45 AM in response to Bob Ryan

    I know - but there are two menu bars, one with the send button and one with the formats:Screen Shot 2015-10-06 at 15.35.52.png

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

  • by financialtechnologygroup,

    financialtechnologygroup financialtechnologygroup Oct 7, 2015 1:47 PM in response to financialtechnologygroup
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Mac App Store
    Oct 7, 2015 1:47 PM in response to financialtechnologygroup

    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.

  • by MacFundamentalistNL,

    MacFundamentalistNL MacFundamentalistNL Oct 7, 2015 3:18 PM in response to WhitworthM
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Oct 7, 2015 3:18 PM in response to WhitworthM

    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.

  • by snsinger,

    snsinger snsinger Oct 7, 2015 4:59 PM in response to WhitworthM
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Oct 7, 2015 4:59 PM in response to WhitworthM

    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.

  • by MacFundamentalistNL,

    MacFundamentalistNL MacFundamentalistNL Oct 7, 2015 11:52 PM in response to snsinger
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Oct 7, 2015 11:52 PM in response to snsinger

    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.

  • by MacFundamentalistNL,

    MacFundamentalistNL MacFundamentalistNL Oct 8, 2015 12:11 AM in response to MacFundamentalistNL
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Oct 8, 2015 12:11 AM in response to MacFundamentalistNL

    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?

  • by financialtechnologygroup,

    financialtechnologygroup financialtechnologygroup Oct 21, 2015 4:00 PM in response to MacFundamentalistNL
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Mac App Store
    Oct 21, 2015 4:00 PM in response to MacFundamentalistNL

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

  • by Terrell Smith,

    Terrell Smith Terrell Smith Oct 21, 2015 6:07 PM in response to Terrell Smith
    Level 4 (3,020 points)
    Oct 21, 2015 6:07 PM in response to Terrell Smith

    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.

  • by financialtechnologygroup,

    financialtechnologygroup financialtechnologygroup Oct 22, 2015 1:20 AM in response to Terrell Smith
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Mac App Store
    Oct 22, 2015 1:20 AM in response to Terrell Smith

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

  • by sknop,

    sknop sknop Oct 22, 2015 1:23 AM in response to Terrell Smith
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Oct 22, 2015 1:23 AM in response to Terrell Smith

    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.

  • by WhitworthM,

    WhitworthM WhitworthM Oct 22, 2015 3:21 AM in response to sknop
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Oct 22, 2015 3:21 AM in response to sknop

    Looking at reports on the App Store it seems that 10.11.1 has similar problems.

  • by kthrynileen1,

    kthrynileen1 kthrynileen1 Oct 23, 2015 2:23 PM in response to financialtechnologygroup
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Oct 23, 2015 2:23 PM in response to financialtechnologygroup

    I agree - I'm sure the OS is fine but the update itself has a major issue as it relates to Mail. When I upgraded, it seemed to roll my Mail program back to about a year ago. I have deleted, re-added, and renamed various email accounts over the last year, a couple of accounts were archived but viewable, and had a couple of new ones. It's as though it pulled my mail preferences from an old profile. All they could tell me was to delete what was currently in there and re-add the IMAP account info. It had to pull this information from somewhere but Apple couldn't help.

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