IMAP Mailbox Recovery?

[Urf]

We recently had a hard drive failure which wiped out all the mailboxes on our exchange server.

I've been using mail.app (v 1.3.8) as my primary e-mail client via IMAP for some time, and while I'd backed up all my mail through april on local folders, all cached files from the last 2 months disappeared when I synched with the (new) server the first time.

I have a backup of my home directory made a week or so ago which has all my old *.imapmbox files, many of which are quite large. I always had a local cache of the files on the server, so I know the data is there.

Here's the question. Anyone know of a way to get the old mail out of this format?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[bramley]

I've never had to deal with this problem before, so this might be no help at all. However, assuming that your mboxes were used by mail.app before, can't you just import them into Mail, via the option on the File menu?

[Urf]

Unfortunately it's not. Since it's an IMAP directory, mail thinks it's a cache file, and as such, secondary to what's on the server.

I have made SOME progress with the issue. I can open the individual cached e-mail files by "showing package contents" and browsing the "Cached Messages" sub directory. If I sort them by date, I can get a decent mirror of the old files.

However, I'd still love to get them back into mail.

Any further thoughts folks?

[bramley]

Quote: Originally Posted by Urf Unfortunately it's not. Since it's an IMAP directory, mail thinks it's a cache file, and as such, secondary to what's on the server.

What would happen if you created a dummy account in Mail - and set your backed up IMAP directory to be the cache of the dummy account. If the server has no mail for the dummy account, then the cache is all Mail has to work with. You might then be able to drag'n'drop the old messages into the real account.

Just a suggestion! I don't know if Mail freaks when the messages don't look as if they came from the right account or not.

[georgio]

Quote: Originally Posted by bramley What would happen if you created a dummy account in Mail - and set your backed up IMAP directory to be the cache of the dummy account. If the server has no mail for the dummy account, then the cache is all Mail has to work with. You might then be able to drag'n'drop the old messages into the real account.

Excellent suggestion! It worked beautifully for me.

I had a very similar problem to Urf (except in my case, I stoopidly deleted a lot of messages while using Pine on the server!) Fortunately I had a backup of the Library/Mail folder on a hard drive, but I was at my wit's end to find a way to re-import the cached messages until I saw bramley's suggestion.

I created a dummy account with the meaningless incoming mail server address foobar@xx.net. Then I quit mail and copied the archived INBOX.imapmbox into the folder Library/Mail/IMAP-george@foobar@xx.net

Lo and behold, when I started up mail, the archived messages appeared in subfolder 'foobar' of my In mailbox. (NB It's important that the dummy account stays offline, so the incoming server address mustn't be for a valid mail account.)

Thanks bramley!

[Urf]

I can't believe I missed the earlier bramley post... thanks a ton... that really sounds like it'll work.

Right now I have a secondary directory structure set up of text files I pulled out of the mailbox files manually. It's very painful to find old messages. This sounds like a perfect solution!

[Raven]

What surprises me the most is what happened to the Exchange server... There should have been a backup made of that server at least once a day... Drive failures happen all the time and come as surprises most of the time, so a server, especially one that is central to a company should have backups. If they don't talk to the about it because right now this problem just seems like strange IT work...