Best strategy to restore a deleted mail account using Time Machine?

Question

Best strategy to restore a deleted mail account using Time Machine?

Hi,

Accidentally I deleted one of the mail accounts in Mail. I thought it was an forgotten duplicate while it was actually the important main one. But luckily I made a backup with Time Machine just days earlier.

What is the best strategy to retrieve it? Because in Mail I have a dozen mail accounts and I only need this particular one.

By the way, I do not use any cloud of IMAP solution. I use POP to retrieve mail from my own domain, where I keep it for a month.

Perhaps restore a duplicate of the Mail folder, move it to different user account on the same machine, run Mail with it and delete everything I don't need. Then I export the mailboxes from Mail under the other account and import those under the normal account?

Posted on Sep 2, 2023 6:22 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

ReindeR Rustema Author

Level 1

107 points

Nov 27, 2023 3:00 AM in response to ReindeR Rustema

I was succesful! But in a way not (exactly) documented here. I created a new account on the same machine. With TimeMachine I brought back all that is needed to restore Mail to the state from the last available backup before my mistake. Not replace, but keep both. I moved the harvested parts to an external hard disk. And then deleted the word (orginal) in the filename, added by TimeMachine because of the 'keep both' option.

Into the new account I copied all the relevant parts from the external disk to reconstruct Mail. Then I start Mail and it asked to import mail. Once Mail was up and running I still did not see everything the way it was. I then moved the freshly created index-folders to the desktop and restarted Mail. New indexes were made and presto! The exact state it was in in late July! After that I exported the mailbox with the missing e-mail into the public folder of my main account. From there I imported it into Mail. All the missing e-mail is back.

The relevant parts to reconstruct Mail are:

~/Library/Accounts
~/Library/Containers
~/Library/Keychains
~/Library/Mail
~/Preferences/com.apple.mail-shared.plist

This is a solution I read as invented by someone who wanted the new iMac of his wife start from fresh (because of some Photoshop issue), except for her e-mail and nothing else.

Thank you all for thinking along and setting me on the right path.

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Answer 2

Old Toad

Level 10

210,597 points

Oct 14, 2023 1:07 PM in response to ReindeR Rustema

Create and log into a new, basic, admin user account, Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac, and see if Mail crashes when opened.. This tells us if the problem is limited to your user account or is system wide.

Note: do not launch any 3rd party apps in the account so as to not install any of the supporting files that most create.

If the problem isn't present then your original account has software installed that could be causing the problem. In that case. download and run Etrecheck. Be sure to give it Full Disk access before running.

Copy and paste the results into your reply. Etrecheck is a diagnostic tool that was developed by one of the most respected users here in the ASC and recommended by Apple Support to provide a snapshot of the system and help identify the more obvious culprits that can adversely affect a Mac's performance.

Copy the report

and use the Additional Text button to paste the report in your reply.

Then we can evaluate the report to see if we can determine the cause of the problem.

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Answer 3

Oct 14, 2023 9:32 AM in response to ReindeR Rustema

opening Mail with an imported V10 folder

In the end I chose a different approach, but I get stuck.

Because the current situation in my Mail client is the one I want to keep, I just retrieved the V10 folder from the Time Machine backup, with the intention to extract only the missing mailboxes from that accidentally deleted account. Export those and import them in my usual Mail environment.

But when I try to open the V10 folder under another (clean) user on the same machine Mail just crashes. It closes with a very long error. Could you help me solve this? Attached the error I got.

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Answer 4

Old Toad

Level 10

210,597 points

Sep 2, 2023 9:19 AM in response to ReindeR Rustema

You can't restore an individual account. Here's what I would do:

1 - export from the other account all emails received and kept since you deleted the account.

2 - go to Users/Home/Library/Mail and copy the V10 folder to the Desktop.

3 - while in the Library/Mail folder enter Time Machine and go back in time to just prior to when you deleted the email account.

4 - restore the V10 folder having it replace the current V10 folder.

5 - import the emails you exported before to the Desktop.

That should get your email account back and all of the emails since then.

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Answer 5

Sep 2, 2023 8:27 AM in response to BobTheFisherman

And specifically a single e-mailaccount among a dozen others? I also want to merge it with the current 'live' situation in Mail. Hundreds of e-mails have come in since then and the other accounts are in tact.

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Answer 6

Sep 2, 2023 9:29 AM in response to Old Toad

That sounds like a feasible plan. Just one extra obstacle. I have hundreds of 'rules' (back from the nineties, when I was still using Eudora) and those move certain e-mails to a complex folder structure in Mail. I would lose those if I delete the V10 folder...

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Answer 7

Old Toad

Level 10

210,597 points

Sep 2, 2023 9:50 AM in response to ReindeR Rustema

Are these rules that were created in the Mail app or are you still using Eudora? If the Mail app they will not be lost.

I forgot to add the if the process does not go well you can always move the V10 folder from the Desktop back to where ir was and reboot to get back where you were before starting the restoration. If the restoration goes as expected then you can delete the V10 folder on the Desktop.

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Answer 8

Sep 2, 2023 1:11 PM in response to Old Toad

I migrated those rules from Eudora to Mail some 20 years ago I think. I already noticed in another situation that rules, signatures and other settings are stored outside of the V10 folder (I remember it was called a V2 folder some years ago).

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Answer 9

Oct 15, 2023 12:30 PM in response to Old Toad

Currently I am stuck at the first stage. I created a new admin account. Launched Mail (retrieved a dozen messages). Then quit Mail and moved the big old V10 folder to replace the recently created, practically empty, V10 folder. Launched Mail. Nothing. The e-mail and account did not appear.

I quit Mail and moved the V10 folder to the desktop and imported the biggest mailbox from it into Mail. That seems to work, but it is slow. Something like one 30th of a progress bar appears and hardly moves the past hours... Let's see what happens overnight...

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