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I lost an email from a day or two ago. I tried to find it using FAF but couldn't find it. Unfortunately, I had to look through over 2,000 emails listed, and only found one with the approx date. Also, it opened to a blank window.

Is there a way to put the search in numerical order? And why couldn't I open the email?

I mistakenly thought that SuperDuper on my flash drive would take me to it, but I guess if I deleted it, SuperDuper doesn't save it.

Hi, Rita, before we get involved in complications, is it maybe still on your email server and you can access it from there?

As for your clone, did you last run SD! either before you received that email or after you deleted it? In either of those cases, the email wouldn't be there.

Hi Artie: My SD runs automatically everyday so before and after the email came. If I inadvertently deleted it, it wouldn't be on my email client. I will check but I think that's what happened. OK, not there. I thought for sure that the info I wanted would be on the sent email back to that person. They sent me info and I replied and said "got it". That part (I got it) is in the sent email, but the actual info I "got" wasn't in the body of the email. It's like it was encrypted or something. It was from a title company so I guess that could be.

As Artie implied. there are complications:

• Mail does not store messages as individual files, they are records in a miniSQL database and only accessible through miniSQL
• Messages are not stored in a readable text form, they are encoded in a format needed for compatibility with the email system
• Only mail can effectively search its various mailboxes.
• FAF searches for text strings and anything it might find in an email would only be coincidental
• In order to find the message you are looking for using FAF you would first have to export and save each message in Mail as a separate file in text form and then FAF could search those files

If you have Time Machine Backups

1. Quit Mail
2. Click on the desktop
3. Press ⇧⌘G
4. Enter ~/library/Mail
5. On the menu bar click on Time Machine and select Browse Time Machine Backups
6. Scroll back to a point in time when you know the missing message would have been in Mail
7. click Restore
8. When the restoration is complete, open Mail and save the message to your desktop
9. Repeat steps 1 through 5
10. choose the most recent time machine backup and click Restore

For those of you who eschew the use of Time Machine, this is a great example of why you need to use it.

Thanks, Joe. I guess I eschew Time Machine. It's never been easy for me to figure out. Simple for some, not so much for others.

only if you have a SuperDuper version that was made while the file was on your system and it has not been overwritten. That is the major weakpoint of clone backups.

if the date of the SuperDuper backup is while the file was on your system, you could copy the /users/your-id/Library/Mail folder from the backup to the same location on your hard drive, and recover it the message that way. Detailed instructions are available if you need them.


In that case, and assuming you have an IMAP email accouint, you might try contacting your email provider and asking if they could restore the emails you received on the particular date it was sent.

That sounds too complicated for me. And have you ever tried to contact Yahoo? One gets nowhere.
I'm finding that with a lot of of websites they make it near impossible to get ahold of an actual person about anything.
Customer service isn't what it used to be.

I maintain two onboard bootable CCC clones, one of which updates every other day, but Rita's experience has got me thinking that I maybe ought to lengthen the alternation to once a week.