Mail Deleted My Email and Accounts

Over the past 3 months, I have managed to unintentionally delete my entire inbox 3 times. The first two times, I was setting up Google Apps for Domains and made the mistake of editing the existing account instead of adding a new account. If you’re changing your email server and you want to keep your old mail in the inbox, then don’t edit the settings, add a new account.

But this week was different. Mail launched and gave me an update notice with information saying that the application was changed, did I want some tips. I clicked yes, read through some things, then when the app fully launched, it showed my .me account and none of my 4 previous inbox accounts. I used colourful language.

Now I know from my first two encounters that going to Create New Account is NOT what I want to do in this scenario. The accounts aren’t deleted, but for some reason my Mail preferences associated with these accounts are deleted. I don’t want to create new accounts, I want to restore the preferences.

In the end, this article by Ron Miller was really helpful, “Stupid OS X Tricks: Fixing Mac Mail Corruption”.

Here’s what I did:

1. Backup you harddrive, especially if you don’t normally do this.

2. Go to Library > Preferences > com.apple.mail.plist and move this file to the desktop.

3. Navigate back to Library > Preferences and launch Timemachine and navigate back to the most recent time that you had proper access to your Mail accounts. By going to this window first, then launching Timemachine, you should be able to easily find com.apple.mail.plist in the file list. Highlight it and click restore.

4. Try launching Mail.

5. If you still get an error. Drag the following file to the desktop: Library > Mail > envelope index.

6. Navigate to Library > Mail and launch Timemachine. Select envelope index and click restore.

7. Try launching Mail.

This worked for me. It took a long time for Mail to launch because it was restoring all my missing mail. Apparently 67,000 emails! Lucky me.

Next up, my iPhone wouldn’t sync. The error was:
iTunes could not sync mail accounts to the iphone (iphone name) because an error occured remapping record identifiers.

This MacRumors.com forum helped me out.

In iTunes with the phone connected, click on the Info tab for the device you are syncing.

Under Mail Accounts, I had four different accounts. I unchecked all and clicked Sync. That worked. Then I rechecked each mailbox and re-synced the accounts.

After doing this for all the accounts, the error disappeared.