Mail Recovery after a system disk failure

Question

Level 1

8 points

Mail Recovery after a system disk failure

System disk failed suddenly and completely. I created a new system disk from my local time machine backup and everything seemed to work except Mail. When I launched mail it reported "Preparing to Import Messages" and proceeded to import 121,052 mail messages. After it imported the last message (about 5 minutes later) it reported the following:

"The Import Failed. An error occurred during the import. Make sure you have available space in your home folder and try again".

The only option I am given is to click on Quit and the system quits Mail. I suspect there is an email which was corrupted when the system disk died but I don't know how to access individual emails on the time machine disk and I don't know how to find and delete the corrupted email causing this problem.

MacBook Pro (17-inch. Late 2011)

High Sierra Version 10.13.6

New disk is 4 terabyte ssd

Failed disk was 1 terabyte ssd

I would really appreciate any help finding and deleting the bad email causing the problem

MacBook Pro 17″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Oct 31, 2024 5:36 PM

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Answer 1

AlWeir

Level 4

3,242 points

Nov 2, 2024 9:06 AM in response to jpmac4

Remove the email address from Mail and re-enter it using the appropriate option for your email address. If you are still having problems go to your email providers website and see if you can find what might be causing the "An error occurred during the import." Delete what you don't want while you are there.

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Answer 2

jpmac4 Author

Level 1

8 points

Nov 12, 2024 9:28 PM in response to AlWeir

I used recovery from the time machine to recover the system to a new system disk as the original system disk was toast. As I described above the system recovered successfully except MAIL. When I launched Mail on the recovered system the system reported it was importing 121,000 messages and at the end of importing, Mail reported the following:

"The Import Failed. An error occurred during the import. Make sure you have available space in your home folder and try again".

As I wrote above, the new system disk is at least 3 times larger than the failed disk and as a result there is no limit on available space in my home folder. Also, I can't do anything else with MAIL. I can only QUIT MAIL. In other words, I can launch MAIL, it automatically recovers 121,000 messages, it reports the import failed and it provides me with a QUIT option. I am not provided with any other option. MAIL does not provide me with any way to add or remove or even identify any message. I need a work around to identify what the real problem is and how to fix the real problem so that I can use mail again. MAIL ISN'T RUNNING ON MY RECOVERED SYSTEM AT ALL.

How do I recover MAIL?

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