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Apple Mail and many other email clients store data locally on your Mac. This is a handy feature but when something goes wrong you may find yourself missing hundreds or even thousands of valuable emails. Disk Drill can help recover those valuable personal or work emails in a few simple steps. macOS Sequoia Ready!
Email data loss can occur for many reasons including damaged hardware and accidental deletion. Regardless of the cause of the data loss Disk Drill can help recover email databases or storage containers used by common email clients such as Apple Mail, Outlook for Mac, Mailbird and many more. Disk Drill can help recover email when the data is stored locally, this means that if you only use email online (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook or Live.com) through your browser Disk Drill, unfortunately, would not be able to help.
If you are reading this article you are likely wondering how to recover deleted email from Gmail or how to recover deleted Yahoo email. The good news is that these files can still be recovered if you had your Gmail or Yahoo account linked to Apple Mail, Outlook, Mailbird or another desktop email client on your Mac.
This is a quick start guide to help you recover deleted email. Check out other in-depth instructions on how to use Disk Drill and the different methods of data recovery.
Use these steps to recover your lost mail on Mac with Disk Drill data recovery software.
Download and Install Disk Drill Email Recovery Software for Mac. Since you will be restoring data that was most likely deleted from your machine’s main drive, DO NOT use that drive for downloading and installing the application. We recommend using a flash drive or external hard drive when downloading Disk Drill.
Launch Disk Drill and choose your Mac’s main hard drive from the app’s disk list. If you are recovering email stored on an external storage device, connect it to your Mac computer before starting the application.
Click the Recover button to start scanning for lost data. Disk Drill will automatically run all of its scanning algorithms in the optimal order which ensures the best performance when retrieving deleted files. You can also control the specific scans that are run and may want to try a quick scan if you are in a hurry. Deep scans can be used to uncover hard-to-find files and will investigate the disk on a sector-by-sector basis to reconstruct and recover lost data.
Select the email file from the list of recoverable items displayed by Disk Drill. Choose a safe storage location at which to save the file that is not on the same disk as the deleted file you are recovering. This protects you from accidentally overwriting the file during the recovery process.
You need to import the recovered email file to use it in your Apple Mail client. Use these steps:
The method that macOS uses to delete data enables deleted email messages to be recovered by data recovery software. When you instruct the operating system to delete a file, it is not immediately removed from your hard drive. Instead, the logical links that make the data available to the OS and other applications are deleted and the space occupied by the item is marked as available for use.
This fact is what enables deleted email files to be recovered as long as you act quickly. You need to restore the lost data before its space is reused by the operating system to store new items. We recommend that you stop using the hard drive as soon as you realize that data has been lost. Don’t use it until you are finished recovering the deleted emails.
No matter what type of device you use to store email files, if it can be connected to your Mac, Disk Drill can recover its deleted data. From external drives to memory cards, all forms of disk-based storage devices are supported for recovery.
Seagate®, Western Digital®, Toshiba®, G-Technology®
Maxone®, KESU®, Silicon Power®, LaCie®
Seagate®, WD®, Fantom Drives®, Dell®
Samsung®, SanDisk®, Kingston®, Corsair®
Lexar®, Hoodman®,
Delkin®
Sony®, Transcend®, LG®,
ADATA®
Disk Drill can recover more than lost email files. Deep scans can recognize and restore over 400 different file types. The recovery tool supports all major video, audio, image, document, and archive file types. Filter files during recovery to quickly find the items you need.
The Apple Mail client can be used to view and manage emails from many different providers. From its unified interface, you can access your emails from iCloud, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, Outlook, and Exchange. Local copies of emails from these providers will all be found in your Apple Mail folder at ~/Library/Mail/V8 and can be recovered by restoring the mailbox files if they are deleted.
Disk Drill is famous for its free data protection algorithms Guaranteed Recovery and Recovery Vault. They might be of great help when you get your local email database accidentally deleted. Recovering your data from Disk Drill's protected data storage is reliable and included in the free Disk Drill Basic edition.
Here are some other methods that may help recover erased or lost email files on your Mac.
If you have accidentally deleted an email file, you may be able to recover it from your Mac’s Trash. Due to the size of some email files, it may have been too large to fit in the space allocated for your Mac’s Trash Bin.
Here’s how to retrieve permanently deleted emails from Mac using a Time Machine backup.
You can recover a deleted email on a Mac from within the mail client using the following procedure.
While it’s certainly possible to recover lost emails from a Mac at home, sometimes it’s better to take advantage of professional data recovery services and avoid the risk of making a mistake during the recovery process, possibly ruining your only chance at retrieving critically important email messages and attachments.
Data recovery professionals have a wealth of experience and access to advanced tools & facilities, so they can perform difficult hardware repairs to recover emails from physically damaged storage devices.
The cost of professional email recovery is almost always higher than the cost of DIY data recovery methods, but the most trustworthy data recovery centers offer free evaluations and charge only for recovered data.
Many third-party backup applications can create full-disk backups that include all applications plus their settings and data. Disk Drill’s Byte-to-Byte Backup feature is a great example, and it’s very easy to recover erased Mac emails from a backup created by it:
Disk Drill can help you recover from all kinds of data loss scenarios. Here are some of the most common situations you may encounter.
You can easily accidentally delete an email file while cleaning ups your Mac’s main hard drive.
Inadvertently formatting a drive can result in a large data loss including all of your saved emails.
If macOS crashes while mail is open, the file that contains archived emails can be deleted or lost.
During a failed or faulty OS installation, random data loss can occur including your email file.
Infection with a virus or malware often results in data loss and email files may be targeted.
A failing storage device can accumulate bad sectors that lead to a lost or unusable email file.
It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes it’s not possible to recover deleted emails no matter how hard you try or which method you use. If at least one of the following conditions is met, then your emails can still be recovered:
If you have a recent local backup of your emails, then you can start celebrating because you should be able to recover them from it without any issues.
When you delete an email message or attachment from your computer, the data remain physically stored on your computer until they become overwritten, giving you a chance to recover them using specialized software. Note: this isn’t the case if your hard drive is encrypted.
Most email clients leave copies of retrieved email messages on the email server, making it easy for you to download them to your computer.
Fortunately, it’s quite rare for none of the three above-described conditions to not be met at the same time, so your email recovery chances are relatively high.
Updated on by Disk Drill Team
Use the following procedure to restore all emails deleted from your MacBook Air.
You may be able to recover permanently deleted emails on Mac by using a backup made with Time Machine or another backup solution.
The email file for the Apple Mail is stored in a hidden folder for each user and is located at ~/Library/Mail/V8.
Try these methods of finding missing emails or lost messages on a Mac.
Permanently delete emails from the Apple Mail client with the following procedure.
Some of the most common reasons that emails disappear from a Mac include:
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Derek Antti, Business Management Information Systems, San Jose State University 
