Lost Emails after crash

[Michael Bentley]

On Jan 26, 2007, at 3:31 AM, Ute Hoffmann wrote:
>
>> on a Mac OS X Jaguar I had a bad crash of applemail yesterday  
>> evening which resultet in the disappearance of an account with all  
>> its emails. As several important mails were in this account, does  
>> someone know a way to get the emails back into Apple mail or were  
>> they somehow "deleted" with the account during that crash. The  
>> account infos were completely gone.
>>
>> Does someone know from which place I could perhapos reimport these  
>> mails into apple mail or at least the place on the machine were  
>> they would be put if they were not in a folder but in the mail  
>> mail account (inbox)?

Look in ~/Library/Mail.  Your inbox folder will be named 'INBOX.mbox'  
and will be found inside a folder named according to the account type  
and account name (perhaps something like 'POP-hoffman.ute at t-online.de').

The actual messages are in a folder named 'Messages' inside  
'INBOX.mbox'.

If your emails are there, I'd suggest making a copy of the 'Messages'  
folder (somewhere outside ~Library/Mail -- just in case).  Then try  
recreating the account to see if your emails are magically returned  
to you.  If not, I *think* you can just copy all the messages from  
your just-in-case copy, and paste them into your inbox.

Lemme know if it works ;-)  Either way, perhaps now is a good time to  
look into backup schemes...

God luck!

Michael