Lost all saved mail in mailboxes after upgrade to Sierra

Hello !

Please follow suggested article : Mail for Mac: Rebuild mailboxes

Thanks !

With Mail open in your menu bar go to Mailboxes ---> Rebuild.

If you have several thousand emails this process could take over an hour, but it will rebuild your email accounts.

Surely you should be able to see some evidence of this rebuild activity? Perhaps the 'activity' box or some OS process?

Posting the obvious, especially something that comes top in a quick google search is lazy and unhelpful.

In my case Rebuild simply deleted the contents of my stored mailbox and then did nothing more.

I have this problem too. It seems to be a similar issue that occurred with El Capitan and the first dot release beyond that. It appeared that Apple fixed that beyond the 2nd or 3rd Dot release of El Capitan. But either the same bug has been reintroduced or a new one which is very similar.

I know how to get the emails back again I think.. but I am holding off doing that this time to help Apple diagnose the problem. I have a case open on it.

Here is how I got the emails visable again last time: Mail seems to have lost mail message content since upgrading to el capitan

See this link for a description of what i am seeing this time: Mails missing or invisible in personal folders since Sierra upgrade

You can try this solution: Mail seems to have lost mail message content since upgrading to el capitan or wait to see if i get any better methods as a result of the support case I have open. The solution takes a while if you have lots of sub folders in personal folders which i do.. roughly 50! If you have only a few then it will be quite quick. BUT until Apple fix the problem I suspect the email will dissappear again with the next dot release. (that is certainly what happened with El Capitan until the finally fixed it.

The good news is that the email is not deleted it is just hidden and Mail has "forgotten" how to make it accessible to you somehow.

Rebuild did not work for me either when i saw a similar issue in El Capitan....

Don't panic... the email is still on your Mac. It is just not visible., at least that is the case for me....see my post below for how i got it back / made it visible when this or something similar happened in El Capitan. I haven't tried it this time yet but i am confident it will work.

Sadly in my case Mail has actually lost the data and some of the mailboxes are now empty so cannot be reimported.

It also appears to have a lot of messages where it can see the header but has lost the link to the email body.

have you tried going to ~/Library/Mail/V2 copying one of the the *.mbox files to, say, your desktop and then importing that *.mbox file back into Mail?

Yes, of course I have. I've already stated that the mailboxes are empty.

I posted my experience in another Discussion. Copying it here and hope it will help:

Post 1:

Installed Sierra (from Yosemite) on Wednesday. First noticed that my Mail signatures were gone. Called Apple Support, when first one failed, was transferred to a Senior. Repaired permissions, restored from Time Machine - still didn't work. Yesterday discovered that some of my mailbox folders were empty, some had old mail, but not recent. Another senior tech got nowhere and reported it to the Engineering Team.

I've since discovered that the missing messages are there, but they're invisible in the mailboxes. When I do a keyword search, the "invisible" messages are returned in the search results (showing as being in their proper folder), and I can read the full message from the search window. But if I open the folder, it doesn't show.

Demented.

Post 2 - Update:

I think we figured it out. The tech walked me through reindexing the mail. When we launched again, there was no difference. Then I noticed under the View Menu "Disable Filter." I tried it on the InBox and it worked! On all the other folders as well. You just need to open your mailbox folders one at a time and hit Command-L to disable the filters.

I never intentionally set up filters for the mail (or Rules). It must have been some glitch or default setting in Sierra. The tech said that he had seen OS transition problems before with users who have a lot of nested folders. To me it's logical filing, but with younger generations, I guess they're just not into hierarchy. I hope this helps you!!

Same here - go from having a list of messages with no content to having empty mailboxes...

Looks like El Capitan all over again....

Me too , because sometimes network speed is slow half of mails are downloaded others vanish .😁

I've tried all of the above recommendations to no avail. Hierarchical mailboxes and contents are still no HD, but neither the mailbox nor their contents show up in Mail. I've reindexed and imported: no change. I find no "Disable Filter" under "View" (which doesn't sound like it fits my situation anyway). Two senior advisors at Apple are stumped. Waiting for engineering to review the logs.

This is crippling! Already looking into alternatives to Mail going forward. The problem is, I can't seem to import to them unless the emails show up in the Mail app. Are they lost forever in suspended animation; only viewable by clicking through 10,000 email files one at a time?