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The Loaf

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 17, 2007
31
26
Hi there, and thank you for any advice. First, I'm not super technical, so appreciate the simple, patient advice here.

Basically, I recently moved from an older MBP running Snow Leopard where I had several POP email accounts with several thousand sent and received emails that I was keeping as records of transactions, old conversations, etc. I have changed absolutely NO settings in the mail program on this machine. About 3 weeks ago I moved on to using a new Mac mini running Yosemite and set up my email accounts on that machine as IMAP accounts. I figured I could just start fresh, and look up the old emails on the old MBP if I needed to. When I migrated from my previous Mac, some 8 years ago, I did the same thing, and all my even older emails stayed on that old machine.

However, I recently fired up the MBP and see that all my emails--sent, received, whatever--have now disappeared. I had no cloud accounts/connections on that machine, but apparently setting up the new Mini somehow changed things?? I have no idea, and wonder if there is ANY WAY to retrieve the old messages?? I thought they were stored on my computer somewhere, as on my old Mac, and as long as I didn't delete any accounts, etc. they would still be there. Apparently not, but is there any solution? I have a time machine backup I made of my MBP done right before setting up the new Mac mini.

Any help you could provide would be truly, truly appreciated. Thank you.
 
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