What A Fool I Am!

Recently doing some "housekeeping" I deleted all of my online mail on my .mac account. I was horrified to find that the emails no longer exist on my computer. Foolishly I thought they were downloaded to my hard drive. Is there anyway to retrieve these?

In a word, NO. I'm sorry. Do you have a backup of them?

MacFriar

I thought Apple's Backup would have solved this but a "restore" didn't prove fruitful. More egg on face.

To the best of my knowledge, Apple Backup only covers account settings, documents in your folders on the desktop, etc, not the content of the IMAP mail account. In order not to lose mail to housekeeping, I have created a number of folders in mail to be used as an archive. What does not need archiving, is generally discarded. Sorry for the housekeeping loss.

MacFriar

In Mail prefs select an account and check your settings for deleted messages. The default is to store on the server for one week in the Trash folder. It could be your last hope other than asking MobileMe support (you can chat live from the support page) if they keep restore points.

Some success. Thanks Bosie!

Have you got Time Machine?

I don't think a local instance of Time Machine will help if the mail was only stored on the IMAP server at Apple.

Correct - I was thinking that he may have had them in Mail before deleting them at some point.