How can I get my IMAP Mail back?

April 4, 2008 10:51 AM

Using Mail.app in Tiger and now all of my IMAP email is gone. Please help.

My ISP (Embarq) gives me POP e-mail, which I forward to Fastmail.fm, so I can have IMAP. I access my IMAP mail in Apple Mail (Tiger).

Last night, something happened where I stopped getting email. Either Embarq stopped forwarding or Fastmail stopped receiving. I decided to just cut out Fastmail, and go back to receiving plain old POP in Mail.app.

When I did this, I lost my IMAP folders and all of the e-mail in them. No problem, I thought. I make regular backups with SuperDuper!, so I'll just go back to my most recent backup and then turn off Airport. I do this, and there are my IMAP folders and in them, the mail I so desperately need.

Yet here's the problem: Mail.app won't let me move the e-mail to a local folder, giving me an error message simply saying the email can't be moved. When I connect to Airport and go online, all my folders and the mail inside of them gets deleted, because the folders and the mail in them isn't on Fastmail's servers anymore.

How can I preserve the e-mail in these folders so that I can simply start over again?

posted by 4ster to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Did you keep local copies of the mail, or leave it on the server? If you left it on the server, well, you're kind of out of luck.

You might be able to get it back if you have local copies; try getting the email back from backup, then running something like Thunderbird, telling it to import your Mail files and settings. Before going online again (if you are successful) move your files in Thunderbird from the Inbox to Local Folders to save local copies. Go online. Upload all the mail from Thunderbird local folders to the Fastmail server (using IMAP of course). Quit. Open Mail. Connect to the Fastmail server using POP3. It should see all of the files on the server as new mail. Download it, move to local folder, kill that account, keep the Embarq one, done.

Best of luck.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:06 AM on April 4, 2008

Call fastmail, hope they have a backup. The mails you see in your backup are phantoms -- they're just cached versions of the headers of emails that are actually stored on the server, and that have been deleted at some point during this mess.
posted by bonaldi at 11:33 AM on April 4, 2008

I'm not totally sure that what bonaldi is saying is necessarily the case.

It's definitely possible that what you have are just the cached headers...in which case, you're screwed unless Fastmail still has them. (Are you sure the messages are gone from Fastmail? Did you delete them? I'd have guessed that they'd still be there, if you just turned Mail.app off so that it wasn't retrieving new mail through them anymore.)

However, Mail.app has several settings regarding IMAP, and one of them is whether to cache the message bodies. If Mail was set to do this, you might still have a significant number of messages, but stored in an inaccessible way.

In the backup (make a copy of it, don't work or even look directly at your only backup copy), inside ~/Library/Mail, there will be a folder for your FastMail IMAP account. It'll be something like "[e-mail]". Inside that will be a bunch of folders that basically match the folders in your IMAP account. Inside each of those is a folder called "Messages". In there, you may find numbered .emlx files. These are cached messages.

Unfortunately you can't directly import these .emlx files back into Mail; you need to gather together all of them (keeping them separate by folder if you want), then convert them to the Unix "mbox" format using a special tool, and then import the resulting mbox file into Mail.

I think by default Mail caches all the messages that you actually download and read on that machine, but it's configurable in the Preferences, under Accounts/Advanced. Depending on how it's set, you may have a lot of messages to recover, or you may not have any at all. If you generally read all your email from that computer, you may have a fair bit though.

Since I'm still a little unclear on exactly what you did, I'm not sure where the mistake was. Just disabling an account in Mail, or even deleting it completely, shouldn't have resulted in wiping the messages off of the remote (in this case, FastMail's) servers. But it sounds like somehow, they got deleted there ... and on IMAP that's the kiss of death, since the server is always assumed to be right. I doubt very much that even if they have backups (they probably do) that they're going to recover files that were deleted via user error. You can certainly try it, but recovering the cached files may be your best/only option.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:51 PM on April 4, 2008

You don't mention using the fastmail web interface. That would definitely tell you whether the mail is on the server.
posted by Wood at 6:47 PM on April 4, 2008

In addition to thanking everyone, I should add that I diagnosed the problem as being with Embarq's entirely unreliable e-mail forwarding and not with Fastmail. As it turns out, automatically forwarding email with Embarq is best done by creating a rule, not by using the autoforward in settings.
posted by 4ster at 8:21 PM on April 5, 2008