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jgnunn

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Missing mac mail folders after power outage

I am not a mac user. A friend of mine sent me this, so I am asking here, any help would be appreciated:


"Exactly what happened . . . .
I was writing a reply to an email when we lost electricity - computer went dead - for 2 days.
When elect. came back on I started the computer and it went right back to the same reply I was writing. A pop-up said the computer had not been shut down correctly and that my email would not download from the server until I rebooted the computer. I rebooted and returned to email and everything was gone.

I expect to lose anything setting in my download screen but I did not expect to lose everything I had saved in all my mailboxes as I had dragged them from the download screen to the mailbox - in my simple mind they were now in a saved file ??

I have a unit called "My Book" that auto backup everything on the computer every couple of hours. I have searched it and found everything - except email :((

I really appreciate your taking the time to look at this. I probably should take it back to the Apple center where repairs are free but I won't have time to do that for a couple weeks.  I thought I may have inadvertently just turned them off so they don't show on-screen but I haven't found anything to turn back on yet."
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rlsm_tech
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I have several questions which I hope can clarify the question.  

1. Did your friend loose all of her email?  Everything she had saved and everything new or just what was being downloaded during this session?  If it was the session then the new mail it is probably gone, if it was the entire cache and she was using Time machine for backups it should be recoverable.  

2. What mail application is she using for email, Apple Mail.app, Entourage, Mozilla?

3. Is she using Leopard Time Machine for backups or the software that came with her WD My Book?
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rlsm_tech
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jgnunn

ASKER

thanks for the reply. He found about 100 emails using the above instructions, but is still missing a 1000+...
I installed Leopard as an upgrade from Tiger and the install program installed a new version of MacMail.  Now I cannot start the application in the normal way and when I open the program in a workaround, my mailboxes are all empty.  I can find the folders with all my mail messages within them but cannot put them in a location recognized by the application.l