Deleting Mail Accounts

[Scrub]

I was talking to a friend over the phone and we deleted her mail account and re-created it. It fixed the problem but I thought it was the same as on a pc when it keeps all the mail already downloaded. All the mail is gone and they need it back.. I've searched google and apparently it saves the data in a disk image (/Users/Deleted Users/userid.dmg).

I tried it on another system and yes I know about the message that comes up and says that all the mail will be deleted but they didn't tell me that on the phone..

I can't find any dmg files, would it be hidden or somewhere else on the machine?

Any help would be appreciated


Dale

[barhar]

A deleted 'Mail' account's e-Mail messages are not saved within the '.dmg' file in the '/Users/Deleted Users/') folder - of a delete (Macintosh) user account.

'Mail' e-Mail messages are stored at '~/Library/Mail/' for each (Macintosh) user account. When a 'Mail' e-Mail account is deleted, the respective account's POP (or IMAP ?) folder is also deleted.

[minckster]

Although I fear that barhar is right, if you want to search more thoroughly, you can try the Unix command 'locate'. You do so in the Terminal app, which is in /Applications/Utilities. Just type 'locate *.dmg' (without the quotation marks) at the the $ prompt and you'll find all of the dmg files that the current user has access to.

You can also try updating locate's database, by typing

sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

at the command prompt. It will ask for your password and may take a long time (minutes, not hours). I think OSX only updates locate's database weekly on its own.

If you want to try recovering deleted files (I've never had much luck), you should stop using the machine NOW and try Googling for help on another machine.

Good luck!