Mail folders

Soshin

Registered
Hi,
I have a problem with Mail that's probably rather simple, but I am very nervous about fixing it.

I renamed a Mailbox, trying to rationalize my boxes. The mailbox contained six other mailboxes, some of which have sub-mailboxes. ie three levels. A new (blue) folder appeared with the right name but NOTHING it. No folders, no email.

I suppose the actual individual emails have lost their addresses or something.

I went into a separate hard drive back up, into my User Library, and made a copy of the correct mailbox which has the email in it. I dragged it into Mail (I think?!) but it is uncoloured and although it has the nested mailboxes in it, there no email in any of them.

How can I restore the email?

I tried dragging the individual email but Mail wouldn't register it at all.

I am very nervous about losing this email because it represents a vital part of the last four years of my research and I use it every day.

I'd be very grateful for some simple, easy-to-understand advice, please!!

Soshin.
 
I renamed a folder (I thought they were named mailboxes) in my Mail program, which has mail which I download from Googlemail... so that means "local", yeah?
Also, I just remembered that after renaming it, it appeared with the new name, and then I deleted (delete...) the old one, after checking that the new one had the correct sub-folders. Unfortunately I didn't check to see if the email was in the sub-folders!

My Mail is 2.1.3. My OS is OS 10.4.11.
 
What happens if you do a File > Import, select "Mail for Mac OS X" and then point to the mail files on your hard drive?

This is using Mail.app under Leopard, so under Tiger it may be a bit different...
 
Thank you! It worked. Never had to do that before.

However...
The imported stuff came into a folder "Import".. okay I can rename that. But it is white, and the top one of the six subfolders is also white. They have got mail in them, all present and correct. But what's this problem where folders go white? Why do they go white?

The other five subfolders are all blue.

And, am I right in thinking that Mail doesn't like much folder-nesting? I had a problem before, though didn't lose mail that time.

Thank you so much anyway...!! I am so relieved.
 
Glad to hear it worked -- but I'm not sure about the "white folder" issue. Do they behave like other folders -- can you rename them, move them, etc? If so, it may be purely cosmetic.

Ah, it looks like white folders only contain sub-folders, not mail messages... while blue folders contain both mail messages and/or sub-folders. I don't think that means that the white folders can't contain mail messages -- I think they're just colored white to indicate that there are no mail messages within that particular folder.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2004020506354295
 
Okay, I seem to be fine now. It is as was described in that info link...

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...04020506354295

....there's a slight blur between the functions of white and blue folders, and I am sure it was when I was moving my folders across levels that the problem arose. Possibly because some mail inside a few of them had "rules".

At least now I know how to deal with the problem! Thank you.
 
solved: I went to search, and searched the mailbox name or key word in one of the lost emails, and when i clicked on it all my lost emails appeared like magic back in the appripriate mailboxes and folders..
 
Back
Top