I added my Question to another thread, but I think it might be clearer to start a new one:
I am using eM Client Business on a Mac.
I have 11 IMAP Accounts.
Somehow today something went wrong, we cannot tell for sure what exactly, but in one Account 3 months of sent mails are missing.
I would like to get them back, but what I’ve tried so far did not help.
I ended the program, restored the complete folder under user/~myuser/Library/Application Suppoert/eM Client/ (and kept a copy of the existing folder).
When I opened the program, nothing has changed, the files were still missing (not even for a short time, as in some threads mentioned).
I am not sure how to proceed from there.
In other mail programs I have each mail in a single .eml file. Here I only seem to have a single .dat file with 65 GB.
How can I get to these 3 months of mails and somehow make them reappear in my account?
I was thinking if there was a setting, where I could change from using ONE .dat file to many .eml-files? Or a converter?
Do you have access to the server? Are the missing emails there? If missing there as well, are there any backup systems in place to recover from it? If so, you can install another email client, Thunderbird comes to mind, link it only to that email address, then once all populated, export all missing to eml using something like Import Export Tools NG. Then import to eMclient in the sent folder. Or rather import some, let’s say 10 which you can remember and monitor/look for, then sync eMclient with that same email address and see if they are going to stay there. If eMclient deletes the manually added emails while syncing, then the problem is more serious.
no, they are not on the server. the webmail does not show them as well.
I am sure they are in the TimeMachine Backup, but I can’t seem to get this .dat file to be shown in the eM Client.
If emails from an IMAP account are also not showing in webmail and restoring your backup from the hidden folder & time machine made no difference, then “provided they haven’t been accidentally deleted” could then just have been eg: “accidentally moved to another folder” within your mail account or within one of your other IMAP account mail folders and are still there.
So suggest you "do a search by either the Sender name, Subject or Body of one of the missing emails and see if it comes up in another mail account folder. Make sure you select “All Folders” in the search and check "Subject, sender, recipient’s, body, notes and attachments.
If nothing is found then click the dropdown on the right of All Folders and select “Custom Folder Selection” and select all your 11 mail accounts incase the missing messages are in another account and do the search again just incase the missing sent messages are in another account.
If the email then appears in the search, if you are using the latest eM Client V10.4.x you will see the folder name “at the top right of the email”. If you don’t have V10, then you can also right click in the body of the email and click Properties to see the email folder location.
Now “if none of the missing emails are found when you search” then you might have eg: enabled Automatic Archiving to eg: move your Account server mail older than x days to an Archive folder below your account folders which then can include sent mail. Or if its a Gmail account, archived email older than x days goes to All Mail
Or if your missing sent messages are not in the Archive folder, then your mail server might have eg: had a problem with their server, and then may have had to restore your mailbox where they may have restored a much older version which then didn’t have those 3 months of sent messages.
So if you are carn’t find any of those missing sent messages "searching all your 11 mail account folders and nothing in Archived folders or Local Folders, “then i would contact your mail server technical support for the account which has the missing sent messages”, and ask them if they recently had any problems with their mail server and tell them 3 months of sent mails are missing and aprox the date when you noticed that.
Wow.
What a great and helpful answer. I am impressed.
Most of the points unfortunately do not apply/help in my particular case:
I searched all mailboxes (thats how we found out, that a search for a known mail did not resolve).
So, “moved to another folder” is out.
Accidentally deleted seems more practical, although no bin showed any of them.
Automatic archiving does not fit, as we are missing mails vom 10-2025 to 12-2025, which I have moved from one mail account to another recently. Older ones are there. I am sure that after the moving the mails were there, because only after I saw them there, I deleted them in my main account.
Contacting my server people seems to be my next step I guess.
Although I have the strong feeling, that restoring files from my time machine backup should do the trick, I think I am missing a step here, except restoring the complete folder of that account (and not touching any local or other folders, too). So I am hoping that someone here might have an insight into that part of my almost last straw.
I will report, if my server people can help in any way – but if there are any ideas regarding the restoring of the mail accounts, I am more than interested in that.
I’m back.
I have gotten a great and fast response from my provider.
It seems there is a backup/recovery-system in place that I did not know until now.
I could restore a backup of a specific mail account myself, which already finished and I am now waiting for all 50 GB of data to sync locally. So far I can see that my missing mails are there.
So I do not know why or how this happened, but I found a fix (not the one I thought I would find, namely finding out how to replace my backup locally in eM Client), thanks to all your thoughts, questions an help. Thank you very much.
If someone has the answer, how one would recover mails from a time machine backup back into eM Client, I would be very interested.
