by I just upgrade to Mountain Lion and was having trouble accessing my Yahoo POP email account. In my intelligence, I deleted the account and went to reset the settings. Afterwards, I noticed that I had lost all of my email on the POP account hat I had not moved into folders. I managed to get my POP account back, but now I want to see if I can manually restore the emails from my Time Machine backup. Thanks in advance for the help!
You can import the POP mailboxes back into Mail, but the process is a little tricky. Let’s take a look at how it’s done:
To begin, we’ll need to show hidden files in the Finder because the Library folder on the Time Machine drive (as on your Mac) is hidden by default. To do this, open Terminal (located in Applications/Utilities) and type in the following command followed by the enter key (Note: you can re-hide hidden Finder files by replacing “TRUE” with “FALSE” and re-running the command below):
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
Next, restart the Finder by typing the following command:
killall Finder
The Library folder is hidden, so you must show it to recover the missing .mbox files.
Next, open the Time Machine drive in the Finder and navigate to Time Machine > Backups.backupdb > Computer Name > Latest > Macintosh HD > Users > Your User > Library > Mail > V2 > POP-name of account.
Here, you will see a few .mbox files. We had a Deleted Messages.mbox, Drafts.mbox, and an INBOX.mbox. Make a copy of the mailbox files you wish to import back into Mail on the Desktop for temporary storage. Note: If the latest backup doesn’t contain the needed account mailboxes, try opening another date/time Time Machine folder.
Be sure to select the .mbox import format.
You can then import these .mbox files by opening Mail and navigating to File > Import Mailboxes. Follow the on-screen instructions to continue importing.
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