Restoring Apple Mail and Your Emails from Time Machine
UPDATE (25 August 2010): Please note that this post is well over 2 years old and as Tim pointed out in the comments below, this method may not be the best solution for restoring emails. According to his restore efforts, changes where made to the timestamp from the date in which they were received to the date in which they were restored. I have not tested this myself.
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The hard drive on my PowerBook completely died the other day, but I luckily had been running Time Machine backups since upgrading to Leopard. (I wasn’t all that pissed off seeing as I was eager for an excuse to replace my wimpy 40Gb hard drive with a new 160Gb drive). I fumbled a bit, looking for a specific Apple Mail restore tool. I knew where all my emails lived, but I thought that Apple would have a specific means for restoring apps like Mail. So I created this mini-tutorial on how to restore Apple Mail from Time Machine simply because I could not find this method elsewhere.
Supposedly, If you attach your Time Machine backup drive, open Apple Mail then launch the Time Machine application, you are presented with historical views of Apple Mail. This did not work for me, the historical views were just blank, so the steps below do not take this approach.
Restoring Your Emails from a Time Machine Backup
Warning: If you have already setup Apple Mail with your accounts and preferences, this will negate ALL your doings.
Note: This process will restore all your email accounts, preferences, passwords, smart mailboxes, etc.
The How-To
- Before loading Time Machine, open the Finder and navigate to Home Folder (username) -> Library. In there will be a folder name “Mail”. Rename it to “Mail (default)” (Select the folder then hit the Return key to rename).
- Mount your Time Machine Backup Drive (ahem, plug it in).
- Control + Click the Time Machine Application and chose “Browse Other Time Machine disks…”. This, of course, brings up the historical view of your backups.
- Go back to your most recent backup (2nd window back) and navigate to Home Folder (username) -> Library. Select the “Mail” folder and click the restore button (bottom right).
- Once the restore is completed, open Apple Mail and you will be presented with an import wizard (below). Simply follow through the prompts and you will be good to go.
That’s it!
UPDATE (20-January-2009): After step 4., also restore ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
Thanks Jon C.
If you have multiple mail accounts, you should also restore the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist file as well. This will ensure all of your account settings are imported. – Jon C.
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May 13th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Thanks it’s a great hint, you should post it in macosxhints.com
May 19th, 2008 at 3:28 am
Awesome content and great instructions even for stupid people like me. Thank you so much for posting this. It worked like a charm and really is appreciated at 2:30 a.m. after hours of reinstalling junk.
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:15 am
This worked. However, I had three email accounts, and it only imported one. My Smart Mailboxes were not imported either.
July 30th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
If you have multiple mail accounts, you should also restore the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist file as well. This will ensure all of your account settings are imported.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Raffy,
This tip is worth it’s weight in gold! Thanks so much for posting such a well though out recipe for a Mail Rescue operation.
Just put Jon’s advice on the article, that is also very valuable!
Take care,
Joseph Hurtado
from Toronto
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:25 am
You saved my life! Thanks!
January 19th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Cheers Great tip! Thank you very much for your time!
January 19th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
I’m thinking about reformatting my computer because its bogging down and needs a larger drive. i have 16gigs of ram so i know its not that. i will be installing it onto a 1tb drive instead. i’ve used time machine to back up since day one and i’ve used it to reload my wife’s macbook when we changed out her hard drives. so i know it does restore all but i have 8 email accounts and i can only find one folder that is labeled com.apple.builtin.mailaccounts and inside that folder does that 1 file called MailAccounts.plist. does this have all my email accounts in it?
i looked at JonC’s post and he said look for the com.apple.mail.plist
and i could not find that file on my computer? i’m running a mac pro and all emails for this business are vital.
i’m actualy scared to do this knowing i have 8 email accounts and over 13,000 emails
January 20th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Hey Logik,
It’s daunting… I know. For some level of piece of mind, before you wipe your drive, you could create a temporary account on your wife’s MacBook, log in, then restore your Emails on it.
I do not believe you want com.apple.builtin.mailaccounts which I am assuming you found somewhere in ~/library/mail/.
I am not sure why com.apple.mail.plist would be missing on your machine. Try opening the finder and navigating directly to:
HardDisk/Users/YOURNAME/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
Then try the same on TimeMachine…
January 22nd, 2009 at 10:26 am
Is there a way to restore just the program and not all the emails?
I think that my program has gotten corrupted-everytime I try to check mail, the little “thingy” just spins and spins and the activity monitor gets stuck a single email and goes no further.
Quit mail does nothing and the only way that I can shut the program off is to force quit it.
It is not a problem with my ISP-I can check mail fine on my other box.
Suggestions appreciated.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Great – worked first time thanks.
(Re-installed after sleep would no longer work properly due to a bad driver)
Thank You
- Andrew
July 28th, 2009 at 2:04 am
Fantastic. Thank you. Great tip. Saved a lot of time – after I had already spent lots of time and really not got very far. 30,000 emails restored . Thank you – a ‘sanity’ saver!
August 11th, 2009 at 11:27 pm
Thank You very much for sharing this solution.
All the best
Ulrik
September 6th, 2009 at 8:27 am
Yep, it worked. excellent. Thanks !
September 26th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Confirmed: this works for Mac OS 10.6.1 as well. Thanks for the tip!
February 3rd, 2010 at 9:47 am
Ich lese deinen Blog jetzt doch schon eine ganze weile aber irgendwie hab ich nie einen Kommentar zu deinen Artikeln geschrieben. Wollte jetzt aber endlich mal ein Lob aussprechen, sind richtig gute Artikel welche du hier jedes mal schreibst. Ich hoffe es kommen noch einige weitere interessante Artikel.
March 7th, 2010 at 7:21 pm
Wow! Your instructions just saved my life!!! thank you!!!!
April 18th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
This solution is NOT an optimal method of restoring one’s email. Following the instructions to rename your Mail folder in the Library will result in Apple Mail re-importing your email (as described above), and time-stamping those imported emails as “received” on the date of importing, NOT the date you originally received them! Hence, all those emails that you may have saved from 1 and 2 years ago now show up in Mail as having been received at the time of your import – today, for example! This totally messed up my Inbox, and now I have to go back and restore the standard way – without first renaming the Mail folder.
May 17th, 2010 at 11:32 am
Das ist ein interessanter Post – freue mich mehr zu lesen.
December 7th, 2010 at 3:37 am
Mit den besten Wuenschen zur Weihnachtszeit von Lilli Gallardo. With seasons greetings and very best wishes from Lilli Gallardo.
January 12th, 2011 at 1:55 am
[...] Restoring Apple Mail and Your Emails from Time Machine [...]
January 30th, 2011 at 8:43 pm
lastly identified someplace with some helpful specifics. thanks alot and keep it coming
February 3rd, 2011 at 5:46 am
Hey there! I just wanted to ask if you ever have any problems with hackers? My last blog (wordpress) was hacked and I ended up losing a few months of hard work due to no backup. Do you have any solutions to protect against hackers?
February 4th, 2011 at 8:43 pm
Many thanks for this!!!
Mail had been playing up for me recently – I was trying to send a message with a 30MB attachment through my Gmail server, and it didnt like it. I ended up with duplicates upon duplicates of the message….. Mail wasnt receiving any messages and was constantly trying to upload SOMETHING (i have no idea what) to the gmail server.
I figured that a complete restore like this was the only way to fix it, after i messed about with some other options.
Thanks again!!
March 20th, 2011 at 1:37 am
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April 10th, 2011 at 3:38 am
The “supposed” “attach your Time Machine backup drive, open Apple Mail then launch the Time Machine application” comment above worked perfectly for me.
May 17th, 2011 at 9:29 am
Awesome tutorial! I’ve used it twice now and since it took me a while to find it this time i’ve even bookmarked it for future reference! You are a live saver. You saved me 7gb of downloading!!!!!!
Cheers!
May 17th, 2011 at 9:34 am
@Tim,
No idea what you did Tim but when I restored it using the method above i did not lose my time stamp. My emails have been restored with the correct date with dates going back to 2007! Maybe you need to restore the com.apple.mail.plist file or maybe you opened the mail app during restoring of the mail folder? i opened mail during restore and it messed up and computer started downloading from the internet.
If you use above message make sure you do all the steps above including restoring the com.apple.mail.plist file before opening the mail app otherwise the import wont happen!
btw i meant *life* earlier not “live”
June 6th, 2011 at 11:55 am
I would like to show some appreciation to you just for rescuing me from such a matter. Right after browsing throughout the search engines and finding suggestions that were not helpful, I believed my life was gone. Being alive devoid of the solutions to the difficulties you’ve solved all through this write-up is a critical case, and those that might have negatively affected my career if I had not come across your web site. Your main skills and kindness in dealing with everything was excellent. I don’t know what I would have done if I had not discovered such a stuff like this. I am able to at this point look forward to my future. Thanks very much for your specialized and amazing help. I won’t hesitate to refer your blog to any person who should have care on this topic.
August 9th, 2011 at 10:16 am
This is brilliant, many thanks for your help. i read many suggestions that made this much more complicated than it needed to be…i restored to yesterdays e-mail and all is in perfect working order, nothing missing…i had deleted email account to try and re-create…no idea i would lose all e-mails associated…
September 15th, 2011 at 12:11 am
I’m doing a thing of the identical interest and are having be aware on this .Cheers.
September 23rd, 2011 at 10:56 pm
This saved my day! Many many thanks!
October 25th, 2011 at 2:10 pm
Thanks Ariel! I am so glad it helped!
October 25th, 2011 at 2:14 pm
Wow Angelica!
I was in a similar situation as you, which is what prompted me to write this. I am so glad that it was able to help you out.
January 27th, 2012 at 5:47 am
How long did the import take? My bosses computer died. I did the full time machine restore. It did the importing mail. Now I have the mail application running with the spinning beach ball. I wonder if it is reloading them or if something bad is going on. Thoughts?
January 27th, 2012 at 8:59 am
Hi Thom,
Any update?
When I did my restore I remember it taking quite awhile, the beach ball stuck around longer than I thought it would, but I had several gigs of emails to import.