Ventura just deleted all my mail rules!

Is there any way to recover my well over 100 carefully crafted email rules that Ventura suddenly decided to delete!

Odd. Look first on your backup.

But where are the rules actually stored on Ventura?

PS Nevermind They are in user/Library/Mail/V10/MailData

However they are still there but not active. Since the top one is SpamSieve that was how I noticed the issue. So no clue how to reenable them They are all shown as active when I open the .plist in TextEdit

And with further verification all my email signatures are also gone from the mail app but show up in the signatures plists.

You can activate them with a click (for each one) in the Mail-Settings.

No you misunderstand. They show up in the .plist file when I open it directly but they are not showing in the Mail settings view. I can’t make them active because there is nothing to click on!

Here is a sample codeblock out of the MessageRules.plist

Active
1
ActiveSyncState
1
AllCriteriaMustBeSatisfied
NO
AutoResponseType
0
CopyToMailbox
~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Misc ads & news.mbox
CopyToMailboxURL
local:///Misc%20ads%20&%20news
Criteria


CriterionUniqueId
f88756ed-b4b2-49f7-869d-d9bf3e9d9a1a
Expression
shutterfly@shutterfly.messages2.com
Header
From


CriterionUniqueId
1bf19794-8a67-4184-ab07-740883c41427
Expression
shutterfly@e.shutterfly.com
Header
From


CriterionUniqueId
20605c06-4f7a-42ed-a6e1-0b182e7dbbfd
Expression
support@photobucket.com
Header
From


CriterionUniqueId
35446581-171e-4a87-a351-ba4330e718b3
Expression
info@archivalphotopages.com
Header
From


CriterionUniqueId
f695b122-aca5-4aa1-b368-760fffa33484
Expression
orders@service.shutterfly.com
Header
From


Deletes
NO
HighlightTextUsingColor
NO
Mailbox
~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Misc ads & news.mbox
MailboxURL
local:///Misc%20ads%20&%20news
MarkFlagged
NO
MarkRead
NO
NotifyUser
NO
RuleId
D1F1D59D-343A-4662-A913-E7DBC3DE6220
RuleName
Shutterfly & Photobucket, scrapbook stuff
ShouldCopyMessage
NO
ShouldTransferMessage
YES
TimeStamp
269641723

I have well over 100 of those types of rules and they are there as best I can determine but not being shown or active I am not using iCloud to sync them and I do not use iCloud for email at all.

Similarily my signature pane in Mail is empty with no signatures attached to my accounts but the .plist that has the actual signatures and the account cross refernce file are there and appear correct.

Is it possible the plist is somehow corrupted, and won’t parse?

Have you tried quitting Mail, and then copy the .plist you identified from the backup back into the Systemfolder of Mail?

Pulled a copy from BU and same results.

see above, yes no results. Plus all the signatures are gone.

Called apple support,
was told to install Ventura 13.4 before I could go any higher in support ladder.
Did that
same result
got on phone with next level support, they had me try several workarounds, FWIW I am not the only person this is happening to, but nothing worked for etiher the rules or signatures. I’ve been told now that it’s escalated to the dreaded “Engineering” and it will take 2-3 working days before any answer is even likely.

I was reading the article linked below and remembered having a problem with OpenOffice years ago that I resolved by deleting its saved state file. The article details the location of the com.apple.mail.savedState folder if you want to try deleting it.

I just deleted it on my Mac and my mail is still working normally. YMMV

[Ventura] Fix Mac Mail Quit Unexpectedly/Keeps Crashing (iboysoft.com)