The hard disk on my iMac (Mac OS X 10.5.8) died, and after getting it replaced I have been trying to restore my files from backup. The backup I have is just a copy of my user directory. I copied the following files from backup to their corresponding location in my user directory before starting up Mail:
- Library/Mail
- Library/Mail Downloads
- Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
- Library/Preferences/comp.apple.mail.searchhistory.plist
Going into Mail, I see my email accounts, and I can look at the lists of email messages… but when I click on the message to see it, there's no message content.
The strange thing is that when I look in INBOX.mbox/Messages for the mail account, I can see the email message files (.emlx files), and opening any of these files I can verify that the message contents are there. But Mail won't show the message contents.
Any ideas on how I can fix this?
UPDATE: Thanks, everyone, for the feedback. It appears that just before my hard drive died I got some files corrupted, and that was the source of the problem. I tried restoring from a backup taken one day earlier, and that worked perfectly.
Best Answer
The email index probably needs to be rebuilt. Last option on the Mailbox Menu.
(And just in case, you do still have your backup, right?) :)