Mail gone wonky!

[Frances144]

I have used Mail on my iBook G4 happily for many years. It potters along, I keep I what I want and chuck the rest.

I am running 10.4.11

Yesterday, the contents of Mail vanished (whilst the icon still stayed in the Dock) and I was given the start-up screen for Mail. I tried repairing permissions and restarting but no, here was the start-up screen with the questions.

So, I answered the questions and got a blank Mail template for my emails.

I dug about abit and found my old email boxes and imported them only to find I now have an import folder plus my original folders (which magically appeared) but no contents of anything I have ever Sent or Trashed. The addressees and dates are all there but no contents.

How do I find these emails. I keep them because sometimes I need to refer back to them. I never deleted them.

Any ideas? and also why did it happen?

[Xairbusdriver]

Last question is the easiest. Mail lost track of where your mailboxes were, probably because its prefs got messed up. You would probably have been better served by replacing its plist from a recent backup. But that's 'water out of the barn.' Anyway, it could be that the 'Import' function would not expect to even see "Sent" or "Trashed" messages. I really have no idea. Bottom line: never trust a computer to maintain historically important information. If you really want to keep something for years, keep backing it up and checking that the backups are readable. But also put the stuff on a different format media and store it off-site.

I suspect that all your messages are still where you found them, the trick is getting Mail to recognize that. It might be best to remove all the imported and new folders and just double-click one of the messages in those known mailboxes. Theoretically (and hopefully!), that should both open Mail and 'remind' it where the messages are. OTOH, probably too logical for a computer...

[Paddy]

Frances, a few basic questions:

Do you have a full, recent backup?

Are you using POP or IMAP mail?

One possible solution (second post in thread):

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?m...06�

Frances, when you go to user->Library->Mail->(choose one of your email account folders)->Inbox, what do you see? You should see a great long list of numbered files with .emlx extensions and if you click once on one of those in the Finder, should see a preview, albeit postage-stamp size, of the email itself. Clicking on it, as Jim says, should make it open in Mail. Most of the emails in my Inbox are 4-12KB in size, if that helps. If they in fact are completely gone - ie: no message content whatsoever, then your only recourse will likely be a backup.

BTW - when I've move computers (which I do whenever I'm going on a trip with my MBP), I just drag and drop the mail folders from the Mac Pro into Mail - that's everything, including the .plist files. That works well. Don't use Import or weird things happen and nothing is arranged the way you want it, in my experience. Migration assistant also works well of course, if you've got a brand new 'puter.