Apple Mail Gone After Reboot!

Drolight · #1 June 20th, 2008, 09:39 AM

I am running a G5 2gHz with 4.5gb of RAM (Tiger). Recently my Mac crashed and when I rebooted the machine, all my mail in Apple Mail ... was gone. The only option I was left with was to start from scratch but I know the databases are still intact as I see them in the following path -

USERS/USERNAME/LIBRARY/MAIL ...

Question is how do I go about reconnecting the program to these databases (IMAP accounts)?

Thanks
Seshu

Mediocer · #2 June 20th, 2008, 11:09 AM

First make a back up of the database.

Because the account is IMAP; all the information is stored on the email server. If you recreate the IMAP account all your mail items should be there.

You can also recreate the account from scratch, then import the database. You can even replace the new data base with the one you want.

Mediocer

Drolight · #3 June 20th, 2008, 11:30 AM

"You can also recreate the account from scratch, then import the database. You can even replace the new data base with the one you want."

HOW?

Thanks
Seshu

Mediocer · #4 June 20th, 2008, 11:43 AM

Simply open mail and create a new account. Making the settings be same as your IMAP account.

If your mail is not there, you copy your backup into your mail folder, overwriting the new account folders. There is also the drag and drop option...

Drolight · #5 June 20th, 2008, 11:56 AM

I have some 6 IMAP accounts ... I could manually (drag and drop - what exactly?) create the accounts again, but I figure being a Mac there should be a better of doing this.

First is trying to understand why this happened in the first place. Next is of course trying to find a fix. I have tried to drag and drop the IMAP folders within the MAIL folder (in Library/) but Apple Mail does not accept those folders. Should I be dropping them in a specific location within MAIL?

Thanks
Seshu

Mediocer · #6 June 20th, 2008, 12:24 PM

Since they are all IMAP, I would just start completely from scratch, recreate all the accounts, that is the easiest way. Mail should see the accounts in your Library and use the information already there. Make a backup first, just in case.

My guess is to what happened is your mail preferences are hosed from the crash. You can try running a disk utility to see if it can fix and disk errors.