Suddenly all but almost exactly the last 10,000 of my emails disappeared...?

[jonasludvigsson]

Hi,

I used to have roughly 105,000 emails in my apple Mail inbox and a similar number in my outbox/sent.
This morning, all emails but 9,998 in my inbox seem to have been deleted. There is a cut at 10,000. Same with the sent box.

I have tried to rebuild the inbox but nothing seems to happen. I have re-started Mail, I have restarted my computer.
I use Mac OS 10.15.7. three days ago I was notified that my iCloud account was full, but I have paid for an upgrade. still no emails.

what can I do?
should I try to replace my old inbox/outbox through Time Machine?
anything easier I can try to do?
best, Jonas Ludvigsson (Sweden)

 

[badshoehabit]

No solution but why retain so many emails? I treat them like I did paper mail - deal then discard or put in a folder.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Sounds like you are using iCloud for your email and as long as you were using IMAP (which I'm guessing you were), the emails are stored on the server, you have a copy of it locally as well.

To ensure that the emails are indeed missing, you should log into your mail through iCloud and see what you see on there. If the number of emails don't match what you expect to see, then it's gone from the server side.

If your iCloud account was full, that would mean that you wouldn't receive any new emails or hold any new files, but your existing data should remain intact. If that isn't the case, you should contact Apple and have them restore your data from backups that they have.