Missing mail! Going crazy...

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Level 1

70 points

Missing mail! Going crazy...

So I'm using Mail Version 2.0.3 (734) on an iBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.2 (8D40). I have three POP accounts set up and one .Mac account. All seem to be working fine except for a single POP account. I'm not seeing any new mail. Now, I now I'm getting new messages because they can be received via Entourage, but who wants to use that, right? I also know I'm getting new mail because when I right-click and Get Info on that particular mailbox, I can see all the unread messages - unread by Mail, that is. I've read them all in Entourage, but Mail doesn't seem to know that. I've rebuilt the mailbox, I've backed up the messages, deleted the account and recreated it, and neither have helped. What's most frustrating is this particular account is my work email account so I've been sitting here at my desk playing Bejeweled and getting nothing much done. At this rate, I'll be unemployed soon and nunable to afford renewing my .Mac account. SO... Please, help me, Obi Wan, you're my only hope!

P.S. Console is saying:

2005-09-28 15:59:43.896 Mail[555] -[POP3Connection fetchMessages:] failed: (null)
2005-09-28 16:04:45.049 Mail[555] -[POP3Connection fetchMessages:] failed: (null)
2005-09-28 16:09:44.202 Mail[555] -[POP3Connection fetchMessages:] failed: (null)
2005-09-28 16:14:44.240 Mail[555] -[POP3Connection fetchMessages:] failed: (null)
2005-09-28 16:19:18.080 Mail[555] -[POP3Connection fetchMessages:] failed: (null)

Posted on Sep 28, 2005 5:10 PM

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Answer 1

Ron Dillon Author

Level 1

70 points

Sep 29, 2005 10:00 AM in response to Ron Dillon

Well, I think I may have fixed my POP account, but I don't know how. Here's what I did:

In Mail, I right-clicked on the offending POP account and the selected get Info. A window called Account Info came up and I selected the account in the first drop-down menu, then selected the Messages on Server tab. This showed me all the messages that I hadn't seen in Mail. I also noticed I had about 200 messages, coming in at around 16 MB. Within that window, I selected a bunch of messages I didn't really need and the clicked Remove from Server in the bottom right of the window. This brought me down to 119 messages at 8.2 MB. I closed the window, rebuilt that particular mailbox and VIOLA! The new messages came flowing in!

I don't know how or why this fixed my problem. I'd love to hear an explaination, though, from one of you. It seems to me that 16 MB of mail isn't alot. Any comments, anyone?

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Answer 2

Oct 3, 2005 6:50 PM in response to Ron Dillon

Ron,

Since many providers have limits, or quotas of what can be on their POP3 mail server at any one time, in the range of 10 - 20 MB, the 16 MB could be related. Mail has no limits of this type for what you can hold in the Inbox of your POP account, after it is downloaded.

How your provider's mail server communicates with Mail is hard to predict. Who is the provider of your POP service, and can you find their policy on how much space you can use on their mail server?

More info, please.

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Answer 3

Nov 14, 2005 10:29 PM in response to Ron Dillon

Brilliant! This worked for me too. I found a couple of e-mails with "Sender Unknown" and size of zero. I deleted those files and the messages began to flow. Before I read your e-mail, I tried to use "Thunderbird". It had no problem with handling these e-mails. This looks like a bug in Mail.

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Answer 4

Nov 18, 2005 1:03 AM in response to Justin Hopper

Just out of curiosity, I did a "Get Info" on my account. I've got my own server space that I pay for and I have a whopping 303MB worth of Mail stored on it. Yikes. If I select the option to delete the messages from the server, that in no way should affect my local copies of Mail, correct? Everything gets immediately downloaded once received in Mail so essentially I have 2 copies of every message: one locally and one on the server, right? Just curious because freeing up 303MB of space on my server would be nice! LOL.

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