Lost Mailboxes

I just got onto my computer this morning and went to Apple Mail. I was stunned to see that ALL of my mailboxes have suddenly vanished!

This is a disaster since I had separate Mailboxes for all my mail - work mailboxes, separate mailboxes for receipts for all my bills, mail going back to 2006!

I haven't made any changes to my computer AT ALL!

Mailboxes do not disappear by themselves. Make sure you're logged on to the correct account. If you are... did you or anyone change your home folder name? And finally, if no changes were made or nothing was accidentally deleted, we'll assume something happened that was beyond your control. Your only recourse is to restore the mailboxes from your Time Machine backup. It's a bit tricky to restore mail from Time Machine so if you need help with that, post back.

I have the only account on this computer and I am the only one with physical access to the computer.

I tried rebuilding the Mailboxes but that didn't do anything.

The only other possibility is that I received a phishing e-mail yesterday - supposedly from Amazon - said my account had been compromised. I read the e-mail a couple of times and decided it was in fact a phishing attempt (I just read what was displayed in the "preview" pane).

I called Amazon and they said they had not sent me any such notice and it was definitely a phishing attempt. I deleted the e-mail (from the trash folder as well).

This morning, there was a message from Sophos that it had found a malicious file and had quarantined it. I don't know if this file could have something to do with the missing mailboxes? I've tried to find a Sophos log to get the name of the malicious file but haven't been able to find anything - yet.

I have backups of my mail on other drives, though they are probably six months old (from before I installed Mavericks). I can't find where Mavericks stores the mail files - I did an online search but couldn't find anything about where Mail files are stored in Mavericks.

This may cement my decision to go back to Snow Leopard, which I already did on my MacBook Pro. I have a real issue with the deletion of the scroll arrows and the only way to get them back is to go back to Snow Leopard.

What seems odd to me is that my "home" Inbox and all of the e-mails that were in that mailbox are still there - just the mailboxes I created for specific mail categories disappeared.

So I found out how to "unhide" the Library folder in Mavericks. (Why did Apple decide to hide this folder - a royal pain in the butt when it's always been visible before? I will never understand why OS developers implement changes with no warning to the users?) I had been searching for the Library/Mail folder as I always had in Snow Leopard but couldn't find it. Then found an article online that Apple decided to "Hide" the User/Library folder????? Fortunately, the article provided a method to "Permanently" display the folder as it always should have. Then I was able to find the "mail" folder.

Come on folks/Apple, why do you always have to make everything harder? I've been using Macs for more than eight years now and all of a sudden Apple changes the rules of the game. (MS does the same incredibly irritating thing.)

So now when I go to the "Users/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes" folder all of my Mailbox Subfolders are there but they aren't showing up in the Mail application.

Come on folks/Apple, why do you always have to make everything harder? I've been using Macs for more than eight years now and all of a sudden Apple changes the rules of the game. (MS does the same incredibly irritating thing.)

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It's hard to believe that someone who has been using Macs for more than eight years could have missed the fact that Apple has been hiding the user folder since OS X 10.7 (Lion). Where have you been?

So now when I go to the "Users/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes" folder all of my Mailbox Subfolders are there but they aren't showing up in the Mail application.

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Then something has changed with your Mail account causing the Mailboxes to no longer be recognized as belonging to that account. If you have a backup of your mail, restore from the backup. You may be able to restore the mail content by re-downloading from your ISP but that depends on whether or not you've elected to remove mail from the server after it's been downloaded.

The problem is Sophos. It has quarantined your mail.

This is why we strongly recommend NOT RUNNING these waste-of-time-and-money programs.

The reason someone who has been using Macs for 8 years didn't know Apple hid the Library is because they didn't have any desire to upgrade to Lion or Mountain Lion. After reading the reviews of those versions I saw no reason or benefit in upgrading - in fact many of the changes were a negative from my perspective.

I finally decided to move to Mavericks since I had been on Snow Leopard for such a long time. Since upgrading I find no real advantage to Mavericks and in fact for me, more disadvantages, which is the reason I went back to Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro.