Updated to 10.11.1 - lost all mail.

[spiritlevel]

After waiting to update to El Capitan until the 10.11.1 update I thought I would be OK...

Most things are OK except when I started mail, everything was completely empty.

I fixed the immediate problem by going into preferences > accounts and activating each account manually (for some reason they had all been deactivated.

Even after activation, each account shows I have lost all outgoing mail servers and passwords for (except iCloud)

Weirdly my incoming mail server field for each account is greyed out and unselectable.

Most distressingly I have lost all my mail folders where 5 years of mail is organised.

Any tips on resolving this please? I tried quitting Mail, removing everything from the V3 folder, copying everything over from a V2 backup folder, deleting the MailData folder and relaunching Mail but that didn't help - basically just put me back to where I was after the upgrade.

Any tips on getting my mail folders back please?

thanks

 

[dianeoforegon]

I tried quitting Mail, removing everything from the V3 folder, copying everything over from a V2 backup folder, deleting the MailData folder and relaunching Mail but that didn't help - basically just put me back to where I was after the upgrade.

Any tips on getting my mail folders back please?

You can't simply move the data over from V2, It needs to go through an upgrade process. I would use Emailchemy to convert the Mailboxes folders in V2 to .mbox (standard) and import into a clean Mail profile.

I blogged this with more detail here. If there is anything I can add to the article to make it more useful, let me know.

Troubleshooting Apple Mail in OS X 10.11 El Capitan

Emailchemy $29.95

http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/

Note: I'm not affiliated with Emailchemy. I'm just a long time satisfied user.

 

[grockk]

It has to upgrade your mail file. I had same thing. You may just need to wait while data is migrated. If you have a backup, might be able to revert, redo upgrade and then just wait. You can check the log files in console when you launch mail and see if it tells you it is doing something or gives an error in the upgrade that isn't self correcting. Sounds like you have a big mail file so may just take more time to upgrade.