How to find folder in MacOS Mail

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I have a large number of message folders in MacOS Mail (v. 9.3, El Capitan 10.11.6), with a pretty deep hierarchy in places–I have folders in folders four or five deep in some places. (I am talking about folders in the Mail GUI at this point, not operating system folders/directories on a drive.)

Sometimes a folder just disappears, and what's happened is that it's become a subfolder of some other folder. (It's possible that I do this by accident with uncautious use of the mouse, but I don't think that's it. I think Mail just gets confused and does stupid things sometimes.)

I know that the folder and its messages still exist, because if I open the message search box, I can find messages, and they are listed as being in a folder with that name. I want to drag the folder back to where it belongs, but sometimes I can't find out where that folder is. Since I have so many folders and subfolders, poking through every folder in Mail to find out where Mail decided to move the folder in question is time consuming.

Is there any way to find a folder, by its name, for example, in the Mail folder hierarchy?

Even if there's no tool in Mail to do this, maybe there's a kludgey way to do it by searching through Mail's data files on disk using ls, grep, Unix find, etc. Maybe there's some graphical utility that I don't know about that will help.

Thanks.

Best Answer

If you want to search in Finder for the same, and then do the equivalent in Mail, you should go to /Users/you/Library/Mail/V* * varies for MacOS. Do either of these 2:

  1. In the question, you mentioned that you can search for specific messages inside mail app. So just pick a rare keyword from one of them and search for the same string in the directory. Press CMD + up to reach its parent folders and then open Mail app and navigate to that folder and fix it.
  2. Since you know the folder name of the misplaced, search for name.mbox and it will give you that folder itself.

Another possibly easy method can be to select a mail, right click, "Move To"-> you should see a lot of folders. I just hope that they're expanded. If you move something by mistake, CMD + Z brings it back.

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