13 Jun 08 _ How to Recover (accidentally) Deleted Messages from Apple Mail
By Christopher
in BlogTorials
So, you just deleted your account in Apple’s fine Mail program and you happened to ignore the warning that explained how all messages associated with this account would be deleted (doh!). Or, maybe (like me) you didn’t realize that removing the account would delete all the Sent Messages for that account. That sucks.
Here’s how to get those messages back (note, this worked for me on Tiger OSX 10.4):
1) Don’t panic.
2) Download a trial copy of Data Rescue II. You’ll need an external hard drive with some free space, so go grab one while you’re downloading.
3) Plug-in that external drive. Open the disk image and launch Data Rescue II. Follow the instructions for performing a “Deleted Files scan”. When the scan is complete you’ll see a Mail folder that contains all your email messages. Recover it. If there is more than one mail folder, recover them all. You may need to register the program at this point as the unregistered version will only recover 5mb of data. Don’t worry, it will be the best $99 you ever spend.
4) Now you should have all the recovered Mail files in a series of folders on your external drive. Each folder holds 1,000 messages. Each message is a separate .emlx file.
5) To get those emails back into Mail you’ll need to convert them to a single mbox file. Download a copy of emlxconvert, open the disk image file and launch the program. I converted my .emlx files in batches of 1,000.
6) Now switch over to Mail and select “Import Mailboxes…” from the File menu. Choose to import data from “Other” and hit continue, and select the folder that contains your new mbox file. Mail will create a new mailbox folder called “Import”, and the messages will begin to appear in this mailbox as they are imported. It took me about 5 minutes to import 1,000 messages on my MacBook Pro (2 GHz Intel, 2 GB RAM).
7) Whew! You have now imported all the messages that were either sent or received by the account you deleted. You’ll need to repeat the import process for each mbox file you created in Step 5.
Leave us a comment if this technique helped you out!
August 25th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Thanks so much for this. Averted a major disaster!
January 5th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
[...] out how to do it here. Tags: Apple Mail, [...]
January 24th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
I have exactly this problem, but have a question:
why do you need an external hard drive for this?
Thanks…
Timo
March 5th, 2009 at 10:17 am
[...] drive. Looking through it the procedure doesn?t seem to be that complicated. Check out how to do it here.Tags: Apple Mail, TipsShare This Popularity: unranked [?]Share ThisShare This Read [...]
March 10th, 2009 at 4:43 am
@timo: The file recovery software needs to create a folder to store recovered files in. The danger of doing this on the internal hard drive is that the process of creating this folder uses space marked as ‘free’ on the drive, and due to the way file systems work, this may overwrite the very data you are trying to recover.
March 26th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Hi, when I get the search results there is no ‘Mail’ folder. Biut I have *definitely deleted them…
September 1st, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Excellent information! A true life saver indeed, 4425 important mails saved !!!
Thanks a 1000 times
October 1st, 2009 at 5:58 am
Do you need to do this before restarting your machine?
I lost my mail a few days ago, found this link and followed the instructions. The only deleted files found by Data Rescue in the ‘Mail’ folder were already mboxes? When I import these into Mail they only contain a single file with no info and a lot of ‘code’ within them.
Is my sent mail lost forever?!
October 14th, 2009 at 9:34 am
24,271 Mails recovered (with attachments!)
Thanks!
November 12th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
I deleted 3000+ emails this morning…. I followed your advice, bought Data Rescue 3, and now i have ALL my emails back again and i have a great DATA recovery tool….
Thanks for the tips!