Disappearing Apple Mail Smart Mailboxes...

Hi,

I have several Macs running systems from Monterey and up to Sonoma. I use Apple Mail exclusively and over the years have made around 40 Smart Mailboxes to help sort regular email and make finding old email a lot easier. To date it has worked really well and the boxes have synched seamlessly from machine to machine.

But they have now all gone - apart from one called 'Today' which has replaced all my mailboxes on all machines.

I checked iCloud and they're not there either. I can make a new Smart Mailbox, so it does not look like a functional issue.

In desperation, I tried to restore all my mail from a Time Machine back up and that did not yield results. I then did some research online and found advice to retrieve the 'SmartMailboxesLocalProperties.plist' from the Mail folder in my User Library. I copied this from an old Time Machine backup which I believe pre-dates the loss, quit Apple Mail and then replaced the newer version of the same file and fired up Apple Mail again.

I still have no Smart Mailboxes. Since then I have tried rebuilding all the mailboxes but to no avail.

I'd guess I'm not alone in this because it followed a recent routine Apple software update which I ran on one of my machines. It then appears to have synched, first to iCloud and then to every machine I've used since.

My only hope is an old 2012 MacBook Pro I use for Boot Camp and car diagnostics that I don't believe had all my email accounts on it anyway.

I'd be grateful for any helpful advice please.

Thanks,

Rich 😊