I recently got a call from a neighbor who said that her iMail email had disappeared; not the app itself, but all the folders and email. iMail wanted her to start over, defining the email accounts. From her point of view, all her email, include some very important stuff, had disappeared.
When I investigated, sure enough, all indications were that her email had disappeared! What a disaster! I googled the problem and came up with this link. It started me on the trail to a solution, which was to find the original email folders and then redefine the email accounts using exactly the same name as used in the Mail folder. She got all her mail back, but it was a little disordered, since the recovered email folders came under a high level email folder called Recovered or something like that. iMail doesn’t offer the necessary folder reorder options to move everything back to the appropriate folder structure.
Anyway, the root cause of the problem is a an iMail “gotcha.” iMail uses a special file, a .plist file, to define some key information about the mail configuration.
| IF THE MAC COMPUTER IS TURNED OFF USING THE POWER BUTTON TWICE IN A ROW WHILE iMAIL IS OPEN, THEN OSX WILL DELETE THE .plist FILE, AND IT WILL APPEAR THAT YOUR EMAIL HAS DISAPPEARED. |
This “twice in a row” doesn’t have to be “twice in a row in a few minutes;” it is “twice in a row ever!” Given our record of frequent internet outages, it is a given that those who use iMail will eventually encounter this problem.
Conclusion: Don’t use iMail. Use a free email application called Thunderbird. OR stick with a cloud (internet) application like Google mail. (By the way, Google mail also has a client program, so, if you have a slow connection, you can download your gmail through the client and manage your mail on your computer, not on the internet.)
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