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Salvaging/Reimporting Old Mailboxes?

I had a hard drive failure while running Catalina. I had my 2013 iMac repaired with an internal 1 TB SSD and Big Sur loaded.

Unfortunately, I "thought" I had a Time Machine backup, but it seems it got corrupted in mid backup. Luckily, I had been operating Catalina and the OS from an external SSD bootup, and I still have that intact. Can anyone tell me where & how to retrieve my very organized mailbox and saved message structure from the old external drive and import it to the new mailbox?

There were 5 user ID's on the old system, and I only want to reimport the ones from my own. The "Import Data from Apple Mail" seems to look for everything, as soon as I select a directory.

Posted on Aug 18, 2022 10:18 AM

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SpockNard Author

Level 1

26 points

Posted on Aug 20, 2022 9:30 AM

I tried contacting Apple "Get Support" (see jmarse1 message below), and it was a total bust. Person never grasped what the issue was, that I needed to find Mailbox files on external drive, ended up sending me a link to restore from Time Machine, no help. I had been looking around online, found something about a "V7" folder, so I did the following: "Mail Top Menu:

File>Import Mailboxes>Apple Mail>" and found the "V7" folder on the good drive and clicked it, just to try it. Lo and behold! It restored a bizarre looking (see pic) but complete set of my mailbox folder structure with intact messages. Now I'll be cleaning that up later, but the worst part is over.

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Salvaging/Reimporting Old Mailboxes?

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