These permissions suggest the owner (me) ought to have full read and write access to the folder however, hidden ACL entries may take precedence and deny access.įor Mail to properly read from this folder, once it is copied you will need to strip off these ACLs from it and all items contained in it, which can be done by opening the Terminal utility (in the Applications > Utilities folder) and running the following command (copy and paste it to the Terminal to run it): chmod -R -N ~/Library/Mail This might be confusing because despite the error that Mail gives you, if you get information on the Mail folder you will see your account has full Read and Write access to it however, this is because the Finder only shows you the older and simpler “POSIX” unix permissions, and does not show much (if anything) about ACL details. When you copied the files from the Time Machine drive, you did so by preserving all permissions settings, including these ACLs.: 0: group:everyone deny write,delete,append,writeattr,writeextattr,chownĠ: group:everyone deny add_file,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,writeattr,writeextattr,chown This happens because Time Machine appends hidden permissions settings called ACLs (access control lists) to files, similar to the following, which help prevent them from being modified on the backup drive (see that they “deny” access for “everyone”). “Mail can’t open because you don’t have the necessary permissions to change the folder where it saves information.” Since this folder contains your Mail messages, you might think this is all that’s needed however, if you try to open Mail immediately after copying the Mail folder from your backup, you may see the following error message in Mail: This folder in your Library directory is the one you will be replacing.
Go to the Library folder in your active user account, and rename the folder called Mail to something like “Mail-old.” You can also right-click the folder and archive (compress) it as a zip file.Select your Mail folder and press Command-C to copy a reference to it.Note that the “latest” folder here will select your most recent backup, but you can choose from any of the available backup instances, if you think one might be more relevant for the data you are trying to restore. Open your Time Machine disk, and then go to the backup of your account’s Library folder:īackups.backupdb > ComputerName > Latest > Macintosh HD > Users > username > Library.To get around this, you will have to restore your Mail data folder manually, along with the corresponding Mail preferences file, which can be done by first quitting Mail and then performing the following routine: Since Mail keeps all of its data in the Macintosh HD > username > Library > Mail folder, you might consider going to your user account’s library (by holding the Option key and choosing Library from the Go menu in the Finder), and then invoking Time Machine from within the Finder to restore a recent backup of the “Mail” folder Time Machine however, you will likely find that even though you can view this folder in Time Machine, the “Restore” button will not be available when choosing this folder. This being the case, the third and perhaps most straightforward approach for recovering large amounts of lost e-mail is to restore your messages manually in the Finder using Time Machine. The second option is to restore your entire system to a prior backup, which again is somewhat impractical since you might lose some third-party application registrations, and take the time to perform the full system restore. The first approach, since you can access Time Machine backups from within Mail, is to go to your mailbox in Mail and then invoke Time Machine and attempt to find and restore your messages from within the Mail interface however, this is only practical for recovering a few messages, and in some cases this approach may simply not work.
If you have recently lost a large number of messages in OS X Mail, then provided you have a Time Machine backup of your system, you will have three options for restoring your messages.