Q: Email in Mavericks Apple Mail is blank and/or missing.

I too am finding, in a few folders at least, saved emails with no content. The emails are dated and appear to all be in their respective folders, but when I open them, the emails open all a blank. Some emails were saved in the last few months. I installed Mavericks last week. I have many folders and thousands of emails and so far it seems isolated to a small portion, but some are important emails. Could this happen to more? Anybody know how to restore these "blank" emails? I won't be able to use this computer for work if my saved emails will disappear!!

I have the same problem when I upgraded to os x 10.9 (Mavericks). I can recover a message by using spotlight to find the blank message, open it and save via manipulations (copy to inbox and then move again to designated mailbox on my MacBook Pro). It is a tedious job, but it shows that the messages are actually not lost. What is causing this blanking of messages?

Fascinating aarts_jos and thank you! I just used Spotlight as you mentioned to find a few "blank" emails and when Spotlight finds them, I see the content. I can open the emails and there is all the content, text, links, etc.....so the email content is not lost after all, just invisible using the normal Apple Mail classic viewing functions of seeing the specific emails in folders and opening them as is typically done. Out of hundreds of folders, I've only found two folders for which this blank email problem has happened. In one folder and its subfolders, it happened to a couple of hundred emails. Would really like to know why this is happening and if Apple is aware of this email/Mail issue.

Although, as a followup, this does not seem to be working for every email...works for some, not others, that I locate with Spotlight....mysterious and troubling. Some I locate with Spotlight still don't display content. Will I lose the content suddenly in other emails in other folders? Who knows? With the emails that do display content when located, it does seem to work to drag those back into their respective folders. Once there, they retain the content while others around them do not. I can't imagine having to do this for every individual email in order to restore the content to visibility. I hope there's a simpler solution.

Just reporting something similar with OS Mavericks and  Apple Mail 7.0 on an iMac (late 2011)

Incoming emails arrive with a title but with no content ---> showing in sidebar.

If part of a "conversation" a single click will bring up "conversation" with the last email enumerated but totally blank.

a double click elicits the same response

But after a few hours

a single click will bring up "conversation" with the last email enumerated but totally blank.

But a a double click brings up the complete email

what is weird is that this is repeatable - the email does not appear on a single click though the number does with everything blank

After a day or so that particular email becomes a normal email

so just now my joining Apple Support Communities has arrived per Mail sidebar but clicking it or double clicking just has a window title and the remainder entirely blank

ipad,iphone-perfectly ok  iOS seemingly not affected.

Inbox   Mailbox-->Rebuild  (not advised - by me)   puts me back 2 days  ie two days of blank emails

make that 6 years !

hopefully they will all come back

No joy.

Some emails returned.

Most over past 6 years not being retrieved and not being displayed by Apple Mail

Unfortunately cannot give the time to this.

Compelled to transfer to another mail client until such time as Apple fix or informs us of potential incompatiblity.

Hello

I have been having the same issue since I migrated to Maverick. All emails in one of the "On My Mac" Mailboxes was displaying only blank messages. After figuring out where the Library/Mail folder was, I found out I had two copies (dont understand why this happens) of the same Mailbox in that Mail folder. Cliclink cmd+I I could see one of them was only a few kbytes in size and the other was several MBytes so I deleted the small folder, renamed the big one to the original name and voila! all emails are back.

Cheers

MV

Here’s what I did and it worked:

Quit Mail if it’s open.

Go to your home Library folder; it’s hidden. To show the Library folder, hold down the Option key, then in the Finder choose Go > Library.

In ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData, delete any file that begins with “Envelope Index,” such as Envelope Index or Envelope Index-shm.

Re-open Mail.

Mail creates new Envelope Index files. This process may take a few minutes, depending on how many messages Mail is reindexing.

Then select the empty Mail Box that may be empty and then click Mailbox>Rebuild.

(I did this last step and it didn’t bring back the content, so I did the following):

Go back into the Library folder and in the Mailboxes folder, look for the ___.mbox file and the new _____-2.mbox file that was made in this process…you can move the smaller folder out of the Mailboxes folder and onto your desktop.

Delete the “-2” from the .mbox folder name that remains in the Mailboxes folder, then close Mail (if open) and reopen Mail. You should then see your missing email content restored when you go back to the folders that had the problems.

It worked!

Many thanks to LAB1029 & to Marco Vin

Recovered my archive mailboxes, message sents. which is a lot.

as per Marco  but just stored a duplicate of "small folder" then copied content of "large folder" to "small folder"

but new incoming emails are as prevously described -  email name from & email title in sidebar  but just a window title, no email title and no  content in these new incoming emails.

no i'm afraid it was a false dawn.

I followed the advice given in this thread. However the problem of blank mails is persistent, but does not happen all the time. So I decided have closer look at what is actually happening. I found that the problem of blanked e-mail messages occurred when I had previously looked at my e-mails on an other device, either my iPad 4 or my iPhone 4. Messages that I did not look at on these devices posed no problem. Previously it was mentioned that two messages appeared. I use filters to put the incoming mail in their proper mailboxes. When I tried to move the corrupted message to the inbox, I got the alert that is impossible to move two messages to the inbox. The way I fixed the problem was using Spotlight to find the blank messages, opening them up The messages are not lost) and then move them to the inbox. The screen activity suggested again the presence of two messages, of which one disappeared when the message was moved to the inbox. That was for me a sign that the message in the inbox was not corrupted. I applied then the filter rules on the messages that I salvaged and I could move them without a glitch to their proper boxes. You can imagine that is a lot of work, that you want to do when you have a large, daily, influx of messages. Unfortunately I have no idea of the cause. It may be sitting in the way the different operating systems and mail systems of my devices and Macbook are interacting with each other. But my account may give a software engineer a clue where to look for. I conform again that the problems started when I had installed Mavericks. I had no problems using  older versions of OSX.

Question that I have then. Does my account of my analysis give a clue where the pain is sitting?