El Capitan dowloaded now have lost emails

How long does it take? How can I monitor if it's still re-indexing or re-building? I'm looking at the "Envelope Index" files in Finder and they seem to have stopped growing in size.

For example on an inbox with over 65517 messages? At least that's how many Time Machine shows from September 24th. After El Capitan that number has shrunken to 6886 with a gap between today's messages (Oct 19th) and July 30th.

Just went through this on my Mac Mini upgrading from Yosemite to El Capitan. Lost mail, especially in a POP account. This fix to re-index Mail brought everything back. Thanks!

I cannot get my email. I tried reindexing and it asked me to add an email account. When I entered my correct email address it tells unable to verify account name or password.

Each time i do this I get an additional envelop index. help someone.

I have the same problem-only the Accounts.plist file is in the V2 folder. I've tried re-indexing the V3 files but that didn't restore the emails in my account. I really need these emails for my work.

Did you get a fix for this problem Emarginata?

I've been troubleshooting this Mail problem for another user. I wonder if upgrading to El Capitan just results in losing emails in some cases. When I looked for the V3 folder in the pre-Capitan Time Machine backup, there was only a V2 folder and it had more numbered folders in it than on the Mac Book Air that went through the El Capitan upgrade. So in the process of upgrading to El Capitan, it looks like it moves the message folders from V2 to a new V3 folder and sometimes not all the message folders get copied over.

So do a Time Machine backup before upgrading to El Capitan so you can restore any missing emails that might result from the upgrade.

Myself, I moved from Outlook to Gmail in 2004 and don't understand why anyone would want to use something as buggy as Apple Mail. Let the Google cloud servers do all the heavy lifting of sorting your mail is my view.

I worked with apple support. The missing mail was in the V3 folder after I did the update. Folders did not show up at first so had to drag mail into finder from V3 library. Apple support helped me do it.

I worked with apple support. The missing mail was in the V3 folder after I did the update. Folders did not show up at first so had to drag mail into finder from V3 library. Apple support helped me do it.

thanks

The account were I lost all my emails was connected to a website I have. I contacted the host of my site and they were able to recover the lost emails thankfully. Not impressed with the El Capitan email swipe Apple folks! I switched from a PC to be done with this kind of stuff. Anyway-emails are back and all is good in the world. So those with a email connected to a website my advise is to contact your website host. They may be able to recover those emails for you.

Cheers!

The trouble with recovering or re-downloading was that there was no priority to today's emails -- Mail was so pre-occupied with re-fetching all the old emails from 6 months ago and no effort was made to fetch today's email today. Did anyone find a way to force Mail to prioritize new emails fetching over old email?

I have the same question. Mail more recent than 1/24/15 isn’t coming in. Is there a way to force the order of mail being retrieved?

I haven’t been able to retrieve current email since upgrading to El Capitan. a few weeks ago. I had hoped 10.11.1 would have fixed the problem, as the notes indicated it would, but no luck. I get about a quarter of my emails starting only January 2013. None of my older messages are present either. Then Mail shows that it’s downloading X of XXXXXXXXXXX messages. It’s well into the 10s of millions of messages but the messages count at the top of my window has stopped advancing, even though the number “downloaded” is increasing. I have no idea what all these millions of messages are. They were not in my box before El Capitan.

I have deleted and recreated my Internet accounts. I have tried re-indexing a few times (with the same result of stopping at 1/24/14 and showing the millions of messages being downloaded), I have deleted the Envelope Index files from the Library folder. And I removed com.apple.mail and com.apple.MailServiceAgent from the Container folder.

I CAN send email from the account. Initially I couldn’t send or receive with El Capitan. It had removed my email address from the account without a text box for me to add it back, but left the settings. Deleting and re-creating the account populated my email address again. and made the mail start coming in for a few hours before stopping.

I am following this thread and trying everything that I understand. Thanks for all the input thus far.

I had the same problem. My fix was this.

1. Make sure your Time Machine backups are running and up to date and include at least one prior to 29 September (the El Capitan release date).

2. Quit mail

3. in Finder, select go to folder and navigate to ~/Library

4. rename Mail folder to Mail_old (I usually then move it to my Desktop so its out of the way)

5. Whilst in Finder at ~/Library, enter Time Machine

6. In the Time Machine window, navigate to your backup of the ~/Library folder immediately before the El Capitan release date - i.e. the latest backup prior to 29 September

7 Select the Mail folder in the backup window and click Restore

8. Once restore has finished, open Mail program and it should reindex your Mail folder as it was prior to the El Capitan backup

9. You can then import mail from your ~/Desktop/Mail_old/Mailboxes folder BUT

10. In the resulting Import folder created in Mail, use Smart Mailbox to filter messages from after your latest backup prior to 29 September so you only deal with messages subsequent to your restored version so you don't have duplicates

Hope this helps and is clear. If it doesn't go right for you, then exit Mail and replace/rename the ~/Library/Mail folder you just restored, with the Mail_old folder you kept from that directory to put things back how they were before you started this process.

Richard

On the left panel, there is a "On My Mac" line. When you mouse over it, appears a "Show" label. Click on it and it expands all the subfolders.

If you mouse over it again, while the subfolders are expanded, then it shows "Hide" to collapse the subfolders again.

A side-note for Apple:

I can only sympathise with the non tech users who think they lost their precious (business) emails as I did. Expanding the subfolders instead of collapsing them would have been the default. This is only one config bit to set properly. That also reveals that you don't eat your own dog food! This is the worse user experience I EVER had with the Mac OS in 30 years! Steve wouldn't have allowed that. Whoever is responsible for that should be sacked.

I have tried all of above with no luck. Unfortunately I did not have a time machine backup which could have resolved issues. El Capitan was already installed then there was prompt to update again which I did yesterday. The important email that I need was there only a few hours before this new update and has now completely vanished. It’s bizarre. It’s my Gmail account on Apple Mail so even going online and searching in Gmail does not work because it has synced the account. Can anyone make other suggestions? Can Apple Support help with something like this? Many thanks.

Oh my gosh, this actually worked! I'm thrilled. :-) I was bummed out because I thought I'd lost all my e-mail, and then I found this thread and I followed your steps, and it worked! I didn't get all my e-mails back (there's nothing in the inbox before yesterday morning), but I got back my folders and everything that was saved in them, which is a lot more than I thought I'd get. Thank you SO much.

Eric,

This restored our mailboxes, only we found the offending index files in:

~/Library/Mail/V3/MailData

many thanks!