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hellmachine · Apr 24, 2005, 02:28 PM

its crazy. i installed tiger and on the first run mail wants to import your old mailbox which went smoothly. some time later i did a search and couldn't find an ebay mail. so i went to my ebay mailfolder and did a sort by date, and what do i see?
all mails between mid 2004 to early 2005 are gone! not only the ones in the ebay mailfolder, all mails in this timeframe were gone. i'm lucky that deja vu don't work with tiger, because it would have overwritten my backup with the "new" mail database.
any of you early tiger getters have the same experience??? is it just me? be careful and do a backup before upgrading. btw. it was a clean install...

Oneota · Apr 24, 2005, 04:01 PM

Originally Posted by hellmachine

btw. it was a clean install...

A clean install? Not an archive-and-install? Did it ask you to re-setup your account when it was done? If so, then there's your reason - mail is stored in your user account's Library folder (assuming it's a POP account), so if you didn't move the files back properly, they'd be gone.

Look through your backups for a "Mail" folder in your account's Library folder. Move that into your new account's Library folder, and all your old mail should reappear.

kemuri · Apr 24, 2005, 04:16 PM

Something similar happened to me. I imported a mailbox (Panther Mail), and it completely ignored every message and folder that was in there.

Others imported fine, but this particular one steadfastly refuses to be imported.
This is just one of many little irksome bugs I'm coming across in Tiger. I'd fire off a bug report to Apple, but since Apple is saying they will not offer support for those versions that were shipped early, I guess I need to wait a week.

This is on a clean install of Tiger, btw.

hellmachine · Apr 24, 2005, 04:24 PM

Originally Posted by Oneota

A clean install? Not an archive-and-install? Did it ask you to re-setup your account when it was done? If so, then there's your reason - mail is stored in your user account's Library folder (assuming it's a POP account), so if you didn't move the files back properly, they'd be gone.

Look through your backups for a "Mail" folder in your account's Library folder. Move that into your new account's Library folder, and all your old mail should reappear.

after the clean install, i dropped my old Mail folder from my old backup library to the new library. after this i opened mail the first time. it recognized the Mail folder and asked to import the mail. everything worked fine, no errors, but not all mails got imported...

Propofol · Apr 24, 2005, 06:33 PM

I did the same thing - when Mail asked me where my old mail folders were on the first run, I let it know, expecting my messages to be there. But nothing except empty folders!

Then, after re-starting Mail, I did the import from Mail's File menu (Import Mailboxes), and everything worked peachy-keen!

Big Mac · Apr 24, 2005, 07:14 PM

Sounds like I will be waiting for a point release to remedy this situation. I cannot afford to deploy the upgrade on business accounts on which all mail folders are potentially important.

hellmachine · Apr 24, 2005, 08:18 PM

alright. it's 2:00 in the morning here and i start to understand what's goin on with mail. and it seems like a very dirty bug, mabe a very old one.
so, if you look in your library you find the "Mail" folder. inside is the "Mailboxes" folder. here you find your folderstructure with subfolders like "foo.mbox". finally inside this folder there is another folder called "Messages" and a file called "mbox". here it starts to get dirty. after the first start tiger mail wants to import your stuff. fine. but it only import from the "Messages" folder. this folder contains every single email as a file with .emlx ending. now the newest file there is of mid 2004. and tiger mail only imports mail out of this folder. so what about the .mbox file? well, starting mid 2004, it contains all mails until now, in one big file. and this file is ignored by tiger mail. what happens mid 2004? i assume some os x update and a change regarding the archiving of mail.app. and it seems like apple ignores his own archive variations.
so the bad news are:
mails don't import all your mails.
the good news are:
if you copied your "Mail" folder from your backup to the Library in tiger, and mail imported only a selection out of it, your mail is still there. it's inside the ignored ".mbox" file.
workaround: let mail do an import again. select "Other". now mail looks for a generic .mbox. now point to your .mbox file and it will be imported. but only one after another. so with complex folder structures it is a hellish work...

Oneota · Apr 24, 2005, 09:45 PM

Just as a suggestion, I would investigate the possibility of using IMAP instead of POP. Then you won't be in this situation again.

Not much help now, I realize, but something to consider for the future.

ManOfSteal · Apr 24, 2005, 10:07 PM

Yikes, I'm glad to know this issue before the big upgrade!

ashtoash · Apr 24, 2005, 10:07 PM

POP is a bad protocol for sure, but this is a reproducable bug. Reproduced on 3 different machines here, all with clean installs.

Chris Grande · 08:00 PM

Earlier versions of Mail 10.3 and below used a single file for each Mailbox you created, so if you created a mailbox called "Email from Mom" you would get a .mbox file called "Email from Mom.mbox" Now if you went and added a mailbox inside of the "Email from Mom" mailbox called "Party"a folder would be created in the file system called "Email from Mom" with a "Party.mbox" file inside it. So for each mailbox you have a mbox file and for each nested mailbox there is a mbox file a folder and the contained mbox files. Things get interesting if you went and deleted "Email from Mom" the mailbox turns white since it first deletes the "Email from Mom.mbox" file but keeps the "Email from Mom" folder. Deleting the white mailbox and you are asked if you want to delete it and all contained mailboxes.

Enter Tiger...
Tiger now stores each and every piece of email as a single file called .elmx. This is because Spotlight is designed to search files on a per-file basis and not search inside of large database like files (like a mbox file) so they had to convet the way Mail stored its mail. When you first open Tiger mail it should convert all those mbox files into the single files.

Hellmachine: Any old version of your mail folder shouldn't have .emlx files in it since Mail never used that format until tiger. Your old mail folder should just contain folder and mbox files.

On a interesting side note since Mail has alway created everything you do by creating a physical file system object it also has its weakness. For example you can't create a mailbox with a period at the begining of the name since the OS will instantly hide the file and Mail will no longer be able to see it.

hellmachine · Apr 26, 2005, 03:20 AM

hi chris,
thanks for your indepth expaination. but now again i wonder why the mail import ignores some mails inside mboxes. and i still believe .emlx files are older than tiger, because a friend who never had tiger told me to drop the forgotten files (he assumes that these were single .emlx files too like in his mailbox) manually to the folders and do a "restore" in mail. so where do he got his .emlx files? whatever, i found no easy way to fix it. the only thing that works is to import the overseen mboxes with the import option "other". now mailo finds all but now i have duplicates all over... argh.

Originally Posted by Chris Grande

Earlier versions of Mail 10.3 and below used a single file for each Mailbox you created, so if you created a mailbox called "Email from Mom" you would get a .mbox file called "Email from Mom.mbox" Now if you went and added a mailbox inside of the "Email from Mom" mailbox called "Party"a folder would be created in the file system called "Email from Mom" with a "Party.mbox" file inside it. So for each mailbox you have a mbox file and for each nested mailbox there is a mbox file a folder and the contained mbox files. Things get interesting if you went and deleted "Email from Mom" the mailbox turns white since it first deletes the "Email from Mom.mbox" file but keeps the "Email from Mom" folder. Deleting the white mailbox and you are asked if you want to delete it and all contained mailboxes.

Enter Tiger...
Tiger now stores each and every piece of email as a single file called .elmx. This is because Spotlight is designed to search files on a per-file basis and not search inside of large database like files (like a mbox file) so they had to convet the way Mail stored its mail. When you first open Tiger mail it should convert all those mbox files into the single files.

Hellmachine: Any old version of your mail folder shouldn't have .emlx files in it since Mail never used that format until tiger. Your old mail folder should just contain folder and mbox files.

On a interesting side note since Mail has alway created everything you do by creating a physical file system object it also has its weakness. For example you can't create a mailbox with a period at the begining of the name since the OS will instantly hide the file and Mail will no longer be able to see it.

CatOne · Apr 26, 2005, 12:53 PM

Here's the way you should migrate your mail.

BEFORE doing anything, rename your mail folder (~/Library/Mail).

Install 10.4

Fire up mail, make sure everything is okay (and that you don't see the old mail, and no import/upgrade took place).

MANUALLY import the old mail from within mail. Let it chug away.

Works fine. It seems the auto-import/upgrade has issues.

AppleOptionFour · Apr 26, 2005, 01:03 PM

Is the rebuild mailbox feature there?

Has anyone tried that?

hellmachine · Apr 26, 2005, 01:04 PM

sounds interesting.
but what do you mean exactly?
what import setting? osx mail, others?

Originally Posted by CatOne

Here's the way you should migrate your mail.

BEFORE doing anything, rename your mail folder (~/Library/Mail).

Install 10.4

Fire up mail, make sure everything is okay (and that you don't see the old mail, and no import/upgrade took place).

MANUALLY import the old mail from within mail. Let it chug away.

Works fine. It seems the auto-import/upgrade has issues.

hellmachine · Apr 26, 2005, 01:05 PM

have tried it. no change...

Originally Posted by AppleOptionFour

Is the rebuild mailbox feature there?

Has anyone tried that?

Thinine · Apr 26, 2005, 02:15 PM

One issue I encountered is that when Mail tries to manually import old mail, it tries to put it in ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Imported. However, in my install, Mailboxes wasn't a directory, it was just a file. So when I tried to import, everything seemed to go okay but nothing was actually imported. Deleting the file and making the directory solved this problem.

The other issue I have now is the fact that some of my imported email can't be transferred to another mailbox. The error I saw in Console said something about incomplete headers. But I could move entire folders of messages from the Import folder to On My Mac just fine.

hellmachine · Apr 26, 2005, 02:55 PM

ok, i tested it. it's the same result as the automatic import. i think it has to do with the fact, that until mid 2004, my mails are in .emlx format. after that the mails got stored in one big .mbox file. i have both storing ways in all subfolders. but the mail.app import only import the .emlx files. i have no idea why and how this dual storage system is happening here.
if i import with the option "other" mail.app looks for generic .mbox files and import these. but it's a hellish work because if you have a folder with subfolders, you have to import every subfolder manually. if you select the folder including subfolders, the folder structure gets lost and the import put it all together... and in the end you have many duplicates. it plain sucks...

Originally Posted by CatOne

Here's the way you should migrate your mail.

BEFORE doing anything, rename your mail folder (~/Library/Mail).

Install 10.4

Fire up mail, make sure everything is okay (and that you don't see the old mail, and no import/upgrade took place).

MANUALLY import the old mail from within mail. Let it chug away.

Works fine. It seems the auto-import/upgrade has issues.

joshiieee · Apr 27, 2005, 01:01 AM

I have a question. The only mail account that I have in Mail is my .Mac account. When I looked in the ~/Library/Mail folder the extension on my boxes are .imapmbox. Does that mean .Mac is IMAP and that I shouldn't encounter this issue?

hellmachine · Apr 27, 2005, 02:27 AM

hmmm, hard to tell. imap stores your mail on a server. so you should be save. BUT if you copy the mails from the imap server to local folders there may be the same problem... i have to say that the mailproblem itself may not be general.

Originally Posted by joshiieee

I have a question. The only mail account that I have in Mail is my .Mac account. When I looked in the ~/Library/Mail folder the extension on my boxes are .imapmbox. Does that mean .Mac is IMAP and that I shouldn't encounter this issue?

Big Mac · Apr 27, 2005, 03:04 AM

Originally Posted by joshiieee

I have a question. The only mail account that I have in Mail is my .Mac account. When I looked in the ~/Library/Mail folder the extension on my boxes are .imapmbox. Does that mean .Mac is IMAP and that I shouldn't encounter this issue?

.Mac is IMAP, yes; if you have all your messages stored on the server, you will not have to worry about this issue.

ambush · Apr 27, 2005, 07:05 AM

Well... have I lost all my messages?

Can I fix this?

CatOne · Apr 27, 2005, 11:59 AM

Originally Posted by ambush

Well... have I lost all my messages?

Can I fix this?

Is there an mbox folder in ~/Library/Mail?

Follow my advice. RENAME that folder. Then run mail, set everything up new, and from Mail.app, do File->Import Mailboxes and point it at the old backup folder.

If that doesn't work, restore them from backup.

If you don't have a backup...

<nelson laugh>
HAAA HAA!
</nelson laugh>

hellmachine · Apr 27, 2005, 12:43 PM

no, they are there, but in the mbox files inside your "Mail" folder in the library.
you have to import them seperately via impot messeges > other
but you loose your folder structure...

Originally Posted by ambush

Well... have I lost all my messages?

Can I fix this?

hellmachine · Apr 27, 2005, 12:46 PM

i know and tried. the question is how to import. with the setting "mac os x mail"? that do absolutely the same as the automatic import. with the setting "other"? this works, but you loose all folder structure except you import every single .mbox in every single folder. bahhh...

for sure i have a backup :-)
but i love the nelson citation, LOL
i use it all the time!

Originally Posted by CatOne

Is there an mbox folder in ~/Library/Mail?

Follow my advice. RENAME that folder. Then run mail, set everything up new, and from Mail.app, do File->Import Mailboxes and point it at the old backup folder.

If that doesn't work, restore them from backup.

If you don't have a backup...

<nelson laugh>
HAAA HAA!
</nelson laugh>

macintologist · Apr 29, 2005, 08:21 AM

I don't understand, is this an issue just with POP, or are .Mac IMAP accounts being affected as well?

hellmachine · Apr 29, 2005, 08:42 AM

it potentially affects any local mail...

Originally Posted by macintologist

I don't understand, is this an issue just with POP, or are .Mac IMAP accounts being affected as well?

Big Mac · Apr 29, 2005, 08:46 AM

I am definitely going to have to wait. I am shocked and appalled that Apple would ignore an issue like this one.

Zoom_zoom · Apr 29, 2005, 10:53 AM

I foolishly didn't visit the forums before installing my copy of tiger,
i "upgraded from 10.3.9" and now my mail is ^%&ed

All of my emails are gone! just no where to be found!!
I have gone to; Mailbox -> rebuild, but it didn't do jack!

has any one got any wise ideas?

cheers

Zoom-zoom

PubGuy · Apr 29, 2005, 11:30 AM

Well, I've tried a couple of different upgrades on different machines.

The "Upgrade" install imported the directory structure, but I had to manually tell it to import from the root level of each folder.

On a "Clean" install, I used the migration assitant to import the previous settings. This imported all my directories, except I still have to go and pull in the "Sent Mail" separetly.

I did an "Archive and Install" with the "Preserve User Settings" and it imported all mail and settings perfectly.

I vote for the "Archive and Install" routine !!!

stuffedmonkey · Apr 29, 2005, 12:29 PM

I had the exact same thing happen to me! It was all emails from like July 2004 to present were gone...

Fear not -the messages are still there though. 10.3 mail uses the .mbox format - one file for each mail subfolder. 10.4 seems to keep each message as a seperate item. When starting 10.4 mail.app for the first time, your old mail is converted. Or not converted, as the case may be - but the mail in the origional .mboxes is still there - just viewable.

I ended up converting to Thunderbird. If this turns out to be really widespread, I may fully write up what I did to get the mail back.....

Just a warning to the above poster - I did an Archive and Install and had the problem, so it seems like that is not the cure. It dosen't happen to everyone - so there must be some set of circumstanses that cause it.

To the people that have this problem - what date range of messages are you missing?

macintologist · Apr 29, 2005, 04:12 PM

If you have an IMAP account, can't you just redownload the mail?

Jerman · Apr 29, 2005, 05:37 PM

Just wanting to mention that I had no problems with it... Used CCC to clone my harddrive before install. Wiped the internal drive, then used migration assistant during install to move everything over. Worked great, and all of my emails are intact. Perhaps this is because they were already in the same format...

Apr 30, 2005, 06:33 PM

Not sure if this'll help, but before upgrading to 10.4, my IMAP mail folder was mail/
After upgrading, I had weird folder problems. I changed mail/ to mail (without the slash) the problems went away.

earth23 · May 2, 2005, 03:20 PM

Luckily I was able to import everything properly into the new 10.4 mail.app. I reorganized the imported mail into a new folder (mailbox), but after restarting the folder disappeared. I can search for mail from people and it will pull up all the emails they sent me but the body of the email looks something like:

The message from Aron _____ <aron@___> concerning �Re: CD-ROM� has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it.

Any suggestions?

turtle777 · May 2, 2005, 04:16 PM

Originally Posted by Oneota

Look through your backups for a "Mail" folder in your account's Library folder. Move that into your new account's Library folder, and all your old mail should reappear.

I'm pretty sure the problems are related to THIS. Importing old mail by fiddling around in the Library folder is definitely NOT recommended.

It is for a reason that mail has an IMPORT function !

-t

turtle777 · May 2, 2005, 04:17 PM

Originally Posted by macintologist

If you have an IMAP account, can't you just redownload the mail?

Yes, you can.

-t

Eug Wanker · May 2, 2005, 04:22 PM

Originally Posted by CatOne

BEFORE doing anything, rename your mail folder (~/Library/Mail).

Why would you want to do that? Just back it up like the instructions say.

Anyways, I just backed up those directories (including the address book ones) onto a CD-R and my backup hard drive, and then imported from there. Worked fine.

Still, Apple definitely needs a better mail backup method.

Simon · May 3, 2005, 08:42 AM

These 10.4.0 problems aside, Mail backs up fine IMHO. Just take ~/Library/Mail and zip it or copy it onto a DVD or whatever you prefer (in my case it's ASR to a fast external FW disk). Everything Mail will ever need is backed up there. Mail has always imported well in my experience.

Jordan · May 4, 2005, 06:51 AM

Originally Posted by earth23

Luckily I was able to import everything properly into the new 10.4 mail.app. I reorganized the imported mail into a new folder (mailbox), but after restarting the folder disappeared. I can search for mail from people and it will pull up all the emails they sent me but the body of the email looks something like:

The message from Aron _____ <aron@___> concerning �Re: CD-ROM� has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it.

Any suggestions?

earth23. I am in exactly the same situation. Upgraded and it was a bit flakey but managed to get it all working. Thought I was out of the woods but today the same thing happened again.

Looked in my ~/Library/Mail folder and found 3 folders:

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

The third one had all the messages in it.

I've backed up the lot so I deleted all my mail accounts. Re-created them again and imported them again from the backed up copy.

I hope it's working for a while now. Don't want this to be a regular occurrence as I don't always back up my mail on a daily basis!

Krypton · May 4, 2005, 07:00 AM

Do you guys have any bundles installed? - e.g. HTTPMail plug-in, Growlmail etc.

Unless you remove these, Mail fails to import your old Mail for some reason.

CatOne · May 4, 2005, 11:30 AM

Originally Posted by Eug Wanker

Why would you want to do that? Just back it up like the instructions say.

Anyways, I just backed up those directories (including the address book ones) onto a CD-R and my backup hard drive, and then imported from there. Worked fine.

Still, Apple definitely needs a better mail backup method.

Because if you rename it, it will not do any imports at the outset. So you don't need to worry about a "bad import," like I experienced twice.

Once you have mail properly set up, THEN you can choose to import, on your terms, when you want. I found it to work well, for me, where the auto-import would hang for some reason.

issue · May 7, 2005, 02:55 PM

Same happened here. I did an upgrade everything imported smoothly. But after a few days all the mail is gone/doesn't show up any more. I don't think it's actually gone since I can still SSH into my server and access the IMAP mail with pine.

This is ridiculous Apple!

milhous · May 7, 2005, 03:57 PM

i also performed a clean install and manually imported my mailboxes from a CCC backup. only odd thing to report at this point is that none of my SENT mails are appearing. In the mail import assistant, it doesn't even list the SENT folder at all. anyone have any thoughts?

romeosc · May 7, 2005, 07:07 PM

I did a clean install and used migration assistant to update from external drive and everything worked fine!

adamberti · May 8, 2005, 12:42 AM

Mail problems here too....

Did a clean install and manually copied my old mail folder over and then opened Mail. It was all messed up. So I decided to import my mailboxes - but now I find that they are all empty boxes!! I use IMAP but my quota is small so I have to archive mail onto my local machine. It sounds like the migration assistant works fine so maybe I will try that next.

On another note, once and a while, I click on an IMAP inbox, and it's empty. A minute ago it would have showed all 500 messages, but now it just says 0. And so does my other IMAP, it reads zero too. Then I click around a bit on different folders, wait, and then it's all back. thoughts?

IMO, Mail is fubar in 10.4 - come on, it even looks strange

Jasoco · May 8, 2005, 08:12 PM

I upgraded and didn't lose anything. In fact, no problems with losing any data.

Mistouc · May 9, 2005, 05:26 PM

I had too this invisible mail pb

Here is a solution that worked for me (from Apple discussion board) :

Go to your mail folder in your library folder and remove (after backup) the folder named 'bundles'. I also removed the 2 files named 'LSMMap' and 'LSMMap2' as advised.

Et voil� ;-)

As Krypton already wrote... Sorry guy I saw your post after replying

all2ofme · May 10, 2005, 01:58 PM

Do you have a link to that discussion?

I tried to import mine as Mail format mailboxes after an Erase and Install and it didn't import any messages. When I imported them as Other it worked much better, though I still had problems. For example, none of my messages after a certain time on Nov 27 2003 imported in one mailbox. Odd.

Other mailboxes had more messages in them than when I backed them up in Panther. Others had fewer. Something's amiss.

Mistouc · May 10, 2005, 03:01 PM

Here is the link to the summary of OS X Tiger Mail related topics. Used with the search module you should find a topic about your problem.

http://discussions.info.apple.com/[email protected]

Good luck