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General discussion

Corrupt Mac Mail -- how 2 migrate old emails? or...

by dinghar Feb 22, 2011 5:00PM PST

Long story short:

I have an overloaded MacMail program (106,000 emails) that now won't launch... which means I can't rebuild it (I have a brand new hard drive purchased in an effort to resolve the problem, so disk utility seems moot at this stage). I am using Snow Leopard and the only version of Mail I have saved on Time Machine (which I just started using) is the corrupt one... so when I migrated to the new hard drive, the same problem migrated, too.

1. Is there any way I can go back to using Backup instead... where I have uncorrupted versions?

2. Assuming that that won't work, do I need to trash and reinstall Mail, or is there an alternative? If reinstall is the only option, is there any way that I can move some of my more recent emails into the reinstalled version?

Leaving for Africa in a few days and desperate to resolve this!

-dinghar

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There is a way to force Mail to re-index the database

by mrmacfixit Forum moderator Feb 22, 2011 9:00PM PST

but offer NO guarantees that it will work.

Make sure that you have a complete BACKUP of the mail folders BEFORE you attempt this procedure.

Quit Mail (not difficult in your case)
Navigate to your HOME folder /Library/Mail and find a file called Envelope Index.
Drag it to your desktop.

Launch Mail

It should not tell you something about reindexing the mail database. In your case, this could take a long time.

FWIW, 106K emails is a little over the top. Have you never thrown any emails away or archived them?

P

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