Ive lost all the emails in gmail but use the apples mail app and time machine so I hoped to be able to restore them easily enough. However, when I open mail then time machine and click back to last week (or any date) the inbox and all folders are empty. A hotmail account I have does have all it's emails in timemachine but 2 gmail accounts do not. I'm running a newish iMac with El Capitan. Can anyone help?
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2)
Are the emails still available at Gmail.com?
No - basically someone got into my account and deleted everything! It's not there in the browser and google say it can't be recovered. This is all ok assuming that the backup works! I thought that apple mail downloads the mails to the hard drive and so should be in timemachine they seem to be for hotmail but not gmail - any ideas?
Tell us exactly how you had mail setup to download gmail as pop or imap?
The only way it will be on your local computer is if you downloaded it to the local computer.
it's imap.
Does apple mail not download them by default? I thought that's what it did when it sync'd the accounts.
Yes, but it's synchronous with the server, so if it's deleted from the server it's deleted from the clients as well. What is strange is that Time Machine does not have it. How did you search Time Machine the mails?
Yes that is exactly what happened - deleted from the server and the delete was sync'd with apple mail too. What I'd hoped was that because it did sync it would be backed up on time machine. I searched time machine by opening mail and then from the time machine icon on the top bar selecting 'enter time machine'. I then scrolled back to last week before the delete happened but everything was black, even last year. As I said a hotmail account I have does appear in time machine but gmail doesn't.
Assuming it did download and time machine did back it up is there another way of getting to the files?
If it's on your Time Machine backup, the Gmail inbox will be in the Mail folder within your Library. My only worry with restoring the inbox is that it will sync with Google again and then they will disappear. Worth a shot though.
Open a Finder window:
Note that within the V2 folder, there should be a separate folder for each email account, such as IMAP-(your email) or POP-(your email)
Good luck!
thanks for all your help by the way!
See Pmintz25's post.
Can't restore gmail from time machine
