Recovering OS X Mail Accounts Lost in Crash

"There's a hacky (but may be only) way to convert your messages to the mbox format which you can then re-import into Mail.

This tool will convert your individual emlx mail files (found in ~/Library/Mail/) to the old mbox format.

To import your e-mail into Mac OS X Mail, follow these stepssource:

Click on ""File"" in the menu bar, then on ""Import Mailboxes""
On the ""Import Data From..."" window, select ""Other"", then click ""Continue"" (In MacMail 3.2, there will be no ""Other"" option, but you will be able to import ""mbox files"" as an option on this menu)
Navigate to the location of your netID.e-mail.mbox folder. Select that folder, then click ""Choose""
Make sure that all the mail folders you want to import are checked, then click ""Continue""

The problem is that just having those folders there isn't all that the Mail app needs. It probably has some settings and dbs stored in it's preferences folder as well (you may be able to use Time Machine to restore these and have everything work again as well).

I would try restoring the following files:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ScreenReader.framework/Versions/A/Resources/English.lproj/ExceptionsDatabases/com.apple.mail.plist
/Library/Mail/MailAccounts.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist"

"(Hmmm, re-reading your question, the following will not help you much. Just for the archives then.)

You can restore the messages with Time Machine directly without the need to copy the message files yourself. But I don't know about restoring the account settings (and I don't know if this will correctly ""connect"" the messages with the accounts).

So: your manual copy may be easier, but if you want to use the Time Machine interface: just first activate Mail and then enter Time Machine. Instead of the usual Finder in the star field, you'll see Mail.

(If you replaced any hardware after the crash: remember you can hold down Option while clicking the Time Machine icon, to change ""Enter Time Machine"" into ""Browse Other Time Machine Disks"".)"

"In Lion the paths are slightly different, the two files to try restoring from Time Machine are:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Accounts.plist

In my case the first did nothing, but the 2nd worked. Accounts.plist had obviously been truncated to 1kb. As to why, that's another question."

"After a restart I opened my Mail program, only to find it empty and asking me to do a set up.

After reading through this thread I found a file named library/preferences/com.apple.mail.plist.saved
so I deleted the newer library/preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
removed .saved from other file name, restarted mail, and everything is good again!"