Losing email between certain dates with Mail.app

G

Grahamd

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Last night I lost a week's worth of emails from all mailboxes on Mail.app - I have several mailboxes, both POP and IMAP

This has happened before - about 6 weeks ago. This time I had a backup online. When I was looking at what files to add in from my backup to the messages in each mailbox, I found that the missing days' messages were in fact there on my disk in the Messages folders. Mail.app somehow ignores them, however, and insists that I have received nothing and sent nothing and drafted nothing between the May 17th and 10pm 24th.

There must be a corrupted preferences file somewhere that can be rebuilt. Any suggestions?

As to the cause, I speculate that Mail.app loses track if I leave the computer running for days at a time. Last night was the first time I have rebooted in about a week. But it was an orderly shut down not a crash. Any comments?

10.5.7 on Macbook white 2.16 GHz 2GB RAM
 
Thanks for this suggestion.
I appreciate it and it is the logical thing to do.

I tried it - with the help of Speedmail as Terminal scares me a little.

However, there is still a week's gap in all the Inboxes, and all the mail I sent last week has also disappeared from Mail.app

The messages in the Finder folder have now been renumbered and have lost their original creation dates - all now set to today.
So it is hard to tell which messages were retained. But a search by content shows that some of last weeks' messages have now gone (they were in the folder before).
It looks like the rebuild goes by the index or some other confused list of messages or dates not by the messages themselves.

I kept a copy of the Mail folder as it was previously and will try something else.

The Macworld link in the HOWTO is very helpful. I think I will try to rebuild the Envelope Index next as described in that article, hoping that this will rebuild from the messages themselves.

Thanks again.

If any one else has suggestions, I would welcome them.
 
As suggested here

http://www.macworld.com/article/56673/2007/03/mailfix.html

under "Brute Force" approach, I re-indexed the Envelope. All my messages from last week and other times now appear again in Mail.app - except for a few new ones that were downloaded when I was testing the failed other (Terminal) approach listed in the article.

Very good to have the messages back. Now I can get to work!

Apart from the specific fix, the lessons I take from this are:
  1. keep current on backups.
  2. make a backup copy of the Mail folder when trying anything new on it.
  3. visit macosx.com when there is a question

Thanks again to Satcomer to pointing me in the right direction.

all the best
Graham
 
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