Deleted Mail Re-Appears?

Hello Tom.

Are the messages deleted from and re-appear in the account's Junk mailbox or Inbox mailbox?

You can try using the Rebuild Mailbox function first but the following will ensure there is no mbox corruption remaining.

If the account's Junk mailbox and for a POP type account, quit Mail first and using the Finder go to Home > Library > Mail > this account named folder (named by the user name and incoming mail server for the account) > Junk.mbox.

Delete the Junk.mbox and empty the Trash.

Launch Mail and a new Junk.mbox will be created automatically by Mail within the account named folder when the next message received by the account is automatically or manually marked as junk.

Tom, I am having the same problem on Mail. Like you, some of the messages I delete keep reappearing, sometimes in duplicate, when I relaunch the application. Haven't rebuilt the mailbox as suggested by Allan. Will try that and see what happens...

Having the same problem. Some Junk messages keep re-appearing. Already deleted the Junk.mbox, but doesn't work

Do you have Junk Mail set to automatic?

For what type of account is the Inbox mailbox for - POP, .Mac or IMAP?

Besides the deleted messages that keep re-appearing, how many messages are in the Inbox mailbox for the account?

I also have a problem with one particular e-mail message. It appears 4 times in my inbox but when I delete it it goes to the trash. If I look in the trash I can delete them from there too. However when I go back to the inbox they are back again. The message was not junk in the first place but had an attachment that did not download. It no longer appears on the mail server on the web but mail won't get rid of it on my computer.
Any Ideas?
Matt

I confirm similar issues with new Mail (2.0.1), and I do not use Junk Mail folder/functionality at all.

Inbox is IMAP account.

It is difficult to trace a pattern, but the main things that happen:
- sometimes, after a start Mail shows each new inbox message twice, in it's tree fashion.
- when deleting a message it goes to Trash, when deleting it in Trash, it re-appears, when deleting it in Trash second time it is likely to go away (this behaviour varies depending upon Account/Trash preferences, it seems to behave if 'move to trash folder' option is uncheked and creates another folder if 'store deleted messages on server' is checked, but this is one-off observation), HOWEVER
- access to the same e-mail account by other means show that some messages are not deleted and not even marked as deleted (even if they are 'fully deleted' by Mail).
- expectedly, those not really deleted messages re-appear, when Mail is restarted AND
- most of times, Mail shows those not really deleted messages in Inbox (not in Trash)

ALSO
- I have one rule that simply says if the message subject has a word 'spam' (added by my mail service), then move it to Trash. Sometimes it does it for new messages, sometimes it leaves it in Inbox, in both cases the story told above repeats.

Cheers.

I am listmom of a newsletter and I get thousands of bounce mail messages in my in box. Recently I couldn't load mail, because it got hung on one of them. After every known trick, I just logged into that same pop server with a Panther-based mac, and it handily loaded in 27,000 messages.

Tiger said there were only 18,000, and despite preferences to the contrary, it wasn't removing messages from the server, even when I manually asked it to.

I copied that mbox onto an external firewire drive, and sneaker netted it over to the TIger machine. I imported the mailbox (several hours) and then tried to apply my rules to it. I "evaluated messages" for a while, then just stopped. I tried again, and it acted like they were all sufficiently evaluated. I have 20+ rules to file mail into as many folders.

NOW< I'm trying to just MANUALLY delete the bounced mail messages. They are the lion's share of the folder.

I sort by subject, and they all stick to gether. I highlight the first one and shift click the second and hit delete. After a long time of "Sorting", "Updating color" and so on, they disappear.

I click on another mailbox, then back on that one, and they're baaaaack.

So, I created a smart mailbox from my search, which ended up being. "mailbox= imported & subject includes "Undelivered"" that mailbox has 17k messages in it and I selected them all, and hit delete (again.) then they disappeared.... and reappeared.

I can delete half at a time, or whatever and they just won't go away. this is a 2 day old install of Tiger, and a brand new mbox fresh from import.

I think Mail 2.0 has is more like New Mail 1.0 and has lots of bugs.

I am also having this problem. I have my mail accounts setup at IMAP and well, I offer no real help - I was hoping to find some. This is really starting to become annoying. I have had to re-delete about 20 emails (some spam, some not) 3 times already and it is only noon.

Same problem here. deleting the message that appears third on the list of messages in my inbox appears to work, but then following a quit and restart, or a rebuild of the inbox, the message reappears. sometimes it is a different deleted message, sometimes the same one. i've tried some variants of the "delete mbox files out of the library" type tricks, but have not solved the problem yet. i'll keep troubleshooting and see if i cant sort it out. (it's a pop acct, btw)

Having a similar problem, but both in 10.3.x and 10.4.2.
I have the preferences set to remove from the POP server 'right away' when brought into the inbox and read, I also have effective junk mail filtering and review filtering, plus some rules for a major headache from undeliverable mail that is geared to class it as read then delete it.
Nothing works to remove it from the server EXCEPT going into the Mail preferences, accounts, advanced and clicking on the 'remove from server now'.
I believe even Entourage from Office 2004 did not remove these 'deleted' mail items from the server!

I've been having the same problem for weeks and it was driving me nuts.

I FINALLY found a solution. Well at least one that works for me.

I went to preferences chose my IMAP account and did the following;

Click on Mailbox Behavior.

Make sure the radio button is not checked for the option that reads "Store Deleted Mail on the Server"

Then Change "Permenantly erase deleted Mail" to "Quitting Mail".

Apparently one of the the recent updates changed the defults for these settings.

Now everything is acting like it should again.

Hope this info helps someone else.

Note: If you use more than one computer and sync with .Mac make sure you change the settings on each computer.

One other thing to try would be to delete the "Envelope Index" within the Library/Mail/ folder. Or at least moving it to the desktop, quitting, restarting Mail, and making sure Mail rebuilds that file w/o causing major data loss. That solved the problem for me, although each and every mailbox had to be rebuilt. But after some time, the problem is gone.

Good luck.

I have tried everything suggested here and still I have the emails that cannot be deleted. I have deleted the junk.mbox files, rebuilt every mailbox, removed the envelope file and re-imported all my messages. I deleted the deleted mail folder.
Does anyone have any more suggestions? The messages come from a pop account. They do not exist on the server any longer.

I frequently have the same thing happen to me. It happens with both Junk Mail and regular messages. When I move messages to a folder, they will reappear in my inbox. It's very frustrating, because I don't know if I already saved the message to a folder, and I don't want to have multiple copies of the same message in my folder. I'm also in a constant battle trying to keep up with the mail in my Inbox, so messages reappearing makes it that much tougher. I'm using IMAP and storing deleted messages locally. I thought maybe the problem was with the IMAP server at my ISP, but given the number of other people experiencing this, it looks to me like a Mail.app bug.