

Update (): I’ve received four reports that messages moved to an iCloud mailbox (that were not originally in that iCloud account) simply disappear instead of showing up there. There’s some evidence that the moving messages issue is related to Microsoft Exchange accounts.Ī doctor friend of mine lost about 20.000 emails when he upgraded to iOS 13. It’s “trivial to reproduce” and lost 160,000 out of 200,000 messages in a test. Update (): Commenter Shiner says that the lost messages from “updating Mail’s data store” happens for local mailboxes every time Mail’s database is rebuilt, not just when migrating from Mojave, and reported this to Apple in August. Update (): See also: Howard Oakley, TidBITS, Hacker News. In order to actually restore them, you have to make copies of the messages that might have already been deleted. I also think that the advice to restore the whole Mac to Mojave makes no sense because as soon as you launch Mail it’s going to delete all the messages that were deleted on the server.

Since they import as new, local mailboxes, this shouldn’t affect messages that are on the server. You can use Time Machine to get at previous versions of the folders in Mail’s data store, and then use the File ‣ Import Mailboxes… command to selectively import them into Catalina Mail. This didn’t make sense to me, and I’ve verified that it’s not the case. Of course, it’s good to make backups anyway.Īpple advisors are apparently telling customers that if Mail data gets lost on Catalina, it can’t be recovered from a Time Machine backup that was made using Mojave. There is no straightforward way to merge restored data in with messages received since the last backup, and also with the live data on the server. Restoring a backup is difficult because Mail data is constantly changing.I’m happy to have most of my mail archived outside of Mail.) (See EagleFiler’s Importing Attachments instructions for more about this. So the backup of the local data will necessarily be incomplete. Making a backup is difficult because, even if you set the preference, Mail no longer automatically fully downloads all messages. You may not notice that anything is wrong unless you are looking at the particular mailbox or messages that are affected.īecause the data is synced to the server, problems can propagate to other Macs and iOS devices. These sorts of issues are pernicious because: But my advice is to hold off on updating to Catalina for now. I don’t know whether these are due to Mail bugs or to other factors such as problems on the Mac or with the mail server. And eventually this syncs back to the first Mac, where the message disappears as well. If the message was moved to a server mailbox, other devices see the message as deleted. Moving messages between mailboxes, both via drag-and-drop and AppleScript, can result in a blank message (only headers) on the Mac.

Updating Mail’s data store from Mojave to Catalina sometimes says that it succeeded, but large numbers of messages turn out to be missing or incomplete.
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Nevertheless, people contact me because it’s not unreasonable to wonder if third-party software is to blame, and I also hear from people who want a second opinion because what Apple support told them didn’t make sense. (Ironically, one of the bugs I’ve encountered is the inability to delete messages via AppleScript.) And, in fact, most of the damage has occurred without my Mail plug-in even being installed. Thankfully, none seem to be caused by my apps. I’ve heard a bunch of reports of data loss in Apple Mail. I’m working on more posts about the Catalina release, but I wanted to start with a short warning.
