On my mac duplicates???

This is happening to me as well. When I sync with .Mac, it adds another "On My Mac" to the mail sidebar. Argh! It's strange, because if I flick the disclosure triangle, one of the others will open.

I also all of a sudden have double "On My Mac" To Dos now too.

Yep. Odd bug that comes up in some circumstances; I don't know what causes it.

I managed to fix things by deleting my mail.plist file. But then I had to re-enter mail accounts, etc.

You could rename your mail.plist, enter a couple test accounts, and see if it's not too much work, and verify it fixes the issue for you.

So what did you do to get the previous "On My Mac" content back into Mail? Import a backup?

TIA

The .plist deleting worked for me, but I had to import the mailboxes back in (they are in the Preferences > Mail folder). They all reappeared, minus flags, unread status, etc. that were trashed with the prefs.

It's in the Library > Preferences folder, and it's called com.apple.mail.plist

same problem, after syncing with dot mac, I have a duplicate "on my Mac" entry . I hope someone figures out how to delete this.

I to Am having conflicts with .Mac syncing!
All went well with update to leopard, but conflicts began when i went to sync my address book, i have been getting warnings saying 'insufficient data' when refering to address book, after several attempts to rectify and reset .Mac sync. i gave up only to return to mail and find that I had about 5 " on m mac " in the side bar!
my belief is that there is problems with syncing with .Mac . What i would like to know is how to reset and get all back to normal?

I have cancelled syncing for now, but How do i fix ' on my mac' duplicates problem ?

Here is a simpler solution I think. You need to be familiar with editing plist files to proceed.

If you are comfortable with that, then:

1. Close Mail completely (Command-Q)
2. Make a backup of your com.apple.mail.plist
3. Then open the original com.apple.mail.plist
4. Scroll down to the "MailSections" array and click the disclosure triangle
5. You will probably see several lines whose value is "local:///"
6. Delete all but the first one of these
7. Save the com.apple.mail.plist (making sure to save as the same name, verify this with Finder when done because it may ask about using extension)
8. Re-open Mail and you should have only one appearance of "On My Mac"

If you have trouble, you can go back into Finder and copy your backup of the plist to back out any changes.

I haven't tested this extensively but it worked on one of my Macs so far. I don't know if there are other ramifications of doing this but it doesn't look like there are.

I followed your instructions, however When I opened com.apple.mail.plist, it opened in text edit. I saw no disclosure triangle. Using 'find', I found "mailsections" and farther down "local:///" but there was only one occurence, not several.
My question is: What application did you use to open the plist file?

I use Property List Editor. It's in Xcode tools. Or at least it was in Tiger; I did an "upgrade" to Leopard (without re-installing Xcode) so my version is presumably just hanging around from Tiger. But I assume it's still available in Leopard.

If you only had one occurrence of "local:///" then this isn't the fix for your problem. It did fix the problem of multiple "On My Mac" instances that I had on all three of my Macs.

If your plist opened in Text Edit and looked like a normal XML file then you could edit it there, but that requires extreme care and knowledge. *I don't recommend it - you might break your Mail configuration.* If it didn't open as XML, then you can't use Text Edit.

The easiest way to get rid of the duplicate is to just move "On My Mac" up in the list. Just grab it and move it to, lets say, above the "Trash" folder. The duplicate will vanish, then you can move it back if you want. The duplicate will still be gone. I don't know why, but this works.

Thanks Wes, it works perfectly !

Message was edited by: Eric Morand

Same problem here, glad I installed 10.5 on my PB G4 first as a test.

Mail looks pretty buggy so far.