On the other hand, the old preferences file will tell Mail that these mailboxes exists.
For instance, if your loss was from deleting some of your mailboxes (or the entire account, and all of its mailboxes), then your current preference settings will not point to these lost mailboxes, so even if you restore the data, Mail will not look for it. Restoring this file will ensure Mail will find all of the messages you recovered, and not overlook any mailboxes. With this step complete, your last step is to restore your old Mail preferences file, which contains the information about the accounts and mailboxes you had configured when the backup of your Mail folder was created.
#UNDO APPLE MAC UPDATE FULL#
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.
#UNDO APPLE MAC UPDATE ARCHIVE#
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.