How to restore deleted iCloud emails from backup?

Eric, Thanks again.

I ended up doing an online chat with Apple Support, which turned into a phone call. They ended up providing the same solution you are proposing... using the Export Mail menu item. I had been trying this, but saving it to a folder rather than the desktop, so that appears to be the magic trick.

For anyone else who runs into this problem, here are the basic steps:

• I started up my Mac from my backup external drive
• Opened Mail and selected the mailboxes where I had accidentally deleted my emails(i my cases, two inboxes for two different email accounts).
• I then went to Mailbox:Export Mailbox and saved the inboxes for the two accounts to a folder on the desktop.

  Mail doesn't show a progress bar, and doesn't even indicate if and when the process is complete, so you just have to wait for a few minutes at least to make sure the process has exported all your emails.

• After the export was complete, i restarted from my internal hard drive
• I opened Mail
• I went to File:Import Mailboxes, and selected "file in mbox format."
• I then navigated to the folder on my desktop, and it automatically identified the mailboxes.
• When it imports it, it creates new folders under "On My Mac" on the side bar. After that, I simply dragged and dropped the emails to the original inbox folder.

The Apple support person I talked to mentioned that, with the large number of emails I had, I shouldn't just go dragging stuff willy-nilly into the inbox folder... then it would look to the apple servers that it was getting a ton of spam and would block the emails from the system. I over several days, I will move several hundred a day (less than a thousand) from the import folder in Mail to the inbox.

Thanks!

Robert

Eric,

Thanks for the reply. I actually did exactly that. However, two problems. One is that there is a crazy hierarchy of folders within folders within folders, and really hard to tell which folders are attached to which mailbox or which email account. And there are so many subfolders with sets of individual emails that it would take forever to run through the whole set.

Also, now that I look at it, the individual files that seem to be related to individual emails are actually just aliases to an online file somewhere... they have a little cloud emblem next to them, and you need to click on that and wait for it to download before you can actually see what that message actually is.

So, it appears that the emails are still somewhere out there in the cloud, but not accessible from the mac.

Thanks.

Robert

I did check my iCloud account with a browser, they all were deleted there as well. Same happened with my Comcast emails, deleted from both the Mail client on my Mac and online.

I was able to restore the emails from a backup up (but only after erasing the whole startup drive and restoring everything from the backup). But as soon as I go online, the icloud account and my Comcast account apparently sync and delete everything again.

Thanks again,

Robert

Eric, thanks again for the reply. I restored, opened Mail while offline, and create a folder for these recovered emails under On My Mac section. Unfortunately, Mail won’t let me move or copy any emails from either account to On My Mac folders. odd, because I have done this in the past with hundreds of other emails.

Let me know if you have any ideas, thanks.

Robert

Eric,

Thanks, I’ll give that a try and let you know how it goes.

Robert