restoring deleted mail

Question

restoring deleted mail

Hundreds of emails were accidentally deleted from my computer and I am having difficult restoring them. They all appear in a Time Machine Backup and I retired this IMAP folder to the desktop. I can see the individual files in this desktop folder but copying individual files over to my the equivalent folders in my Libray does not make the files appear in the Mail app. I have restarted and rebuilt preferences - is there something else I need to do? Thanks

iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5), 2.7ghz i5

Posted on Oct 10, 2015 5:01 AM

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Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

684,039 points

Oct 10, 2015 8:37 AM in response to Roger Billcliffe1

Try Mail/File/Import Mailbox. This should create a new folder in the On My Mac section. Copy the e-mails to the desired location. If you still can't see the e-mails, try rebuilding the mailbox.

Rebuild mailbox

If that doesn't work, try re-indexing the mailboxes. This can take awhile if you have a lot of mail.

Reindex messages

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Answer 2

Oct 13, 2015 8:21 AM in response to Eric Root

Thanks Eric.

I have two missing mail boxes/accounts. I copied both from the Time Machine backup to the desktop. I imported one account, copied the messages to the current inbox - all fine - great, thanks

The second mailbox refuses to import. I select ****.mbox and it returns a message 'no relevant files found.

'. Have tried this several times with same result. Can I simply copy the files from my desktop to the ~/Library/Mail/*** folder and then rebuild and/or reindex, or will this kill my current emails?

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