Apple Mail had ended up with both a “Sent” and a “Sent Messages” folder, the iMac filing into one and the iPhone into the other. Tidying that up by hand looked sensible. Afterwards, years of sent mail — including transaction records — were simply gone.
The client ran their business from an iMac and relied heavily on sent mail as a record — documents extracted from messages, confirmations, transaction correspondence.
Mail had two sent mailboxes. This is common and it has a cause: the local client keeps its own “Sent Messages” while the server offers a folder it designates as the sent folder, and where the two are not correctly associated you end up with both, each collecting from a different device.
The client dragged the contents of one into the other to consolidate them. The operation appeared to complete. Afterwards both mailboxes were effectively empty and years of correspondence were unreachable.
Before any recovery work, one question decides whether a laboratory is needed at all.
On an IMAP account — which covers most business mail, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and iCloud — the server holds the authoritative copy and the Mac holds a synchronised cache. Messages that vanish locally are frequently still on the server, and a great many lost-email cases resolve in ten minutes through webmail or the provider’s recover-deleted-items window. It costs nothing, so we always ask before anything is booked in.
On a POP account, mail is downloaded and removed from the server, so the Mac holds the only copy in existence.
This client was on POP for the older account. That is why the local files were all that remained, and why the merge was as consequential as it turned out to be.
Apple Mail keeps two separate things, and the distinction is the whole case.
Each message is stored as an individual file on disk, containing the complete message — headers, body and attachments — in standard internet mail format with a small amount of Apple metadata appended. Those files are self-contained and self-describing.
Separately, Mail maintains a database indexing all of them: which mailbox each belongs to, read status, thread relationships, the summaries the message list displays.
Dragging a large number of messages between mailboxes asks Mail to move files and rewrite that index at the same time. Where the operation is interrupted, or where the two mailboxes map to server folders that no longer agree, the index can end up describing a state that does not match the disk.
Mail then displays what the index claims — which was nothing. The message files themselves were largely still present, orphaned from the structure that pointed at them.
The iMac’s drive was imaged read-only and everything ran against the copy.
The mail store was examined directly rather than through the application, which is the point of the exercise: the index is the damaged component, so nothing that depends on the index can be trusted. Individual message files were located by signature across the live mailbox structure and across unallocated space, including a substantial number the merge had unlinked.
Because each file carries its own complete headers, the recovered messages arrived with their dates, recipients, subjects and threading information intact — and attachments came back inside their parent messages rather than as loose files needing to be matched up.
Those were then rebuilt into a clean mailbox structure with a freshly generated index, so the archive imports into Mail as a working mailbox that sorts and searches normally, rather than as thousands of individual files.
About 98% of the sent mail, including the transaction records that mattered. The shortfall was messages whose files had been partly overwritten between the merge and the machine arriving.
That gap is the part worth noting: the iMac stayed in normal use for several days afterwards. On a mail store, ordinary use is exactly what overwrites orphaned message files — every message received lands somewhere, and free space is where it lands.
So if mail disappears, stop using the machine for mail. And check the server first — it is free, it is faster, and on an IMAP account it resolves the problem more often than not. Mac recovery is from £300 +VAT after a free 48-hour diagnostic.
Post it or bring it in. Either way the diagnostic costs nothing and commits you to nothing, and you get one figure in writing before a single screw is turned.
Nothing can begin until the device is on the bench, which makes this the only step that needs anything from you. Pack it properly, put your details in with it, and send it over. What follows is a free diagnostic and a written figure, in that order.
Posting it? Use something tracked and insured — whatever is on the drive is worth considerably more than the postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm, and it still wants packing as above for the journey.
Tell us what the device is, what it is doing, and anything already tried — an engineer will come back with a realistic view of the odds and a price band, before you commit to posting anything.
We’ll get back to you soon. Anything pressing, call 0161 871 0788.
Check the mail server first, and check it before paying anyone. On IMAP accounts the server holds the authoritative copy and often keeps deleted items for a period, so the messages may simply be in webmail. On POP accounts the Mac holds the only copy, and that is when recovery work applies.
Because the local mailbox has not been mapped to the correct server folder, so the Mac and other devices file into different places. It is a settings problem rather than a fault — and correcting it in Mail’s mailbox behaviours is far safer than moving messages by hand.
It is riskier than it looks, particularly with large numbers. The operation rewrites both the message files and the index that tracks them, and if those end up disagreeing, Mail displays what the index says — which can be nothing, even with the messages still on disk.
Yes. Attachments are stored within the message files, so where a message is recovered its attachments come with it. Headers survive too, which means dates, recipients and subjects return and the archive can be sorted normally.
As a clean mailbox structure with a rebuilt index, so it imports into Apple Mail as a working archive rather than thousands of loose files. It can also be supplied in a portable format if you are moving to another mail client.
It is priced as Mac recovery, from £300 plus VAT after a free 48-hour diagnostic. Check the mail server first though — if the account is IMAP, that may cost you nothing at all.
Kick off with an instant online quote, or ring us and talk it through first. Either way you’ll know a clear, fixed price before any work starts.