(This tip is not quite right. Look at the updated one instead).
After deleting much of his email by mistake, Matt Clare has posted two ways of recovering Apple Mail messages in Tiger. Of course, as he suggests, the first step is to have a backup.
There is a third way that you can use if disaster strikes AND you have a backup.
Matt points out that there is no easy way to import messages in the new 10.4 format (individual XML documents with the emlx extension) into Mail.app. But you can put the messages back and force Mail to reindex them. Here’s how:
- Quit Mail.
- Make a backup of your complete ~/Library/Mail folder just in case, by dragging it out of the Finder window onto the Desktop.
- Create a new directory in your ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes folder called – for example – “backup.mbox”.
- Create a sub-folder in the new folder called “Messages”.
- Copy all the messages (emlx files) that you want to restore from your backup into that sub-folder.
- Delete the file called “Envelope” from your ~/Library/Mail folder. This is the SQLite database that indexes your messages.
- Launch Mail. If it can’t find an ‘Envelope” file, it will launch a dialog saying that it is “importing mail” (in fact it is reindexing what’s already there and what you added in Step 5).
- When the reindexing is complete you can find your messages in the new mailbox by looking at the Mailbox listing on the left. You can then move them to wherever they really belong.
This has worked for me.
And there is a fourth way, as well, for some people. If you use a half-decent backup app, you can probably quit Mail, restore the whole ~/Library/Mail folder from the backup to the state it was in pre-disaster and then launch Mail again to find everything there.
You know, now that I think about it, that might be the easiest way :-)
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