Inbox mail gone...

[outerben]

Hello, I was attempting to break my inbox (of 6,000 some messages) into smaller folders. I moved about 5,000 old emails into another folder so that I would only have about 1000 current emails in my inbox. Once I moved the old emails into the new folder - all my current (received before 2006) emails are gone. Simply vanished. If anyone can shed some light on this I would appreciate it. I am running Mac 10.3.9 with a Dual 2 Gig G5 with 1 Gig of ram. Mail ver. 1.3.11 (v622).

I have looked in my users/library/mail and cannot any trace of my missing emails. Can anyone help!?

 

[perfessor101]

Try rebuilding your inbox (Mailbox > Rebuild).

Just as a matter of good practice, since you are obviously so dependent on your email you should backup up the entire ~/Library/Mail folder daily maintaining at least 10 versions in case you backup a corrupted version by accident. You should also do a backup anytime you are making major changes to any of the mailboxes.

FYI in Mail 1.3.1 in Panther keeps all the inbox messages in a single .mbox file. Mail 2.0.x in Tiger keeps each message in a separate .emix file and simply maintains an index of the messages in each mailbox. Mail 2 is a lot safer than Mail 1.3.1 because of that. You can lose one file without losing all the messages. Even if you lose the index Mail 2 can reindex the messages without data loss. One more reason to move to Tiger.

 

[outerben]

Thanks for the backup advice, although it does not help my current situation. I tried to rebuild the mailbox, with no sucess. I think it is time to get Tiger.