Multiple Copies of Emails

Once again, I woke my MacBook and downloaded the latest e-mails as usual. Shortly thereafter, everything back to September 26th began to download AGAIN!

So about a week passed and then everything was downloaded again. This is a serious problem. It's hard to believe a fix has not been produced.

It appears to be impossible for the Apple culture to admit that it laid an egg with this one. They're caught up in their own PR.

I suppose I've been luckier than most here; this happened to me for the first time on the afternoon of Sat Oct 2 and once more this morning.

It is only happening on the POP accounts. My IMAP accounts on .mac and gmail are unaffected. POP accounts are on 34sp.com who use PLESK.

The only other device checking during this time was my iPhone.

I have tried Ernie Stamper's file deletion, so I'll see how that goes, but given there were around 36 hours between occurrences I can't say yet.

I would also add that I upgraded to Snow Leopard (from Leopard) in early September (and 10.6.1 when that came out), but this weekend is the first occurrence of this problem. Before that mail was working flawlessly.

(why does AD allow you to edit your message, then when you hit submit tell you you can't)

Yes. You select the VIEW menu and SORT BY STATUS

I am also seeing this on one of my four IMAP accounts. I have tried deleting and setting up the account all over again to no avail.

SInce people are having this problem both with POP and IMAP but with very varying results, I am beginning to suspect that this may be an issue between how Mail.app interprets some mail server software, or how it is configured. A vendor with these settings work:

OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UIDPLUS CHILDREN NAMESPACE THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES SORT QUOTA IDLE STARTTLS] Courier-IMAP ready. Copyright 1998-2005 Double Precision, Inc. See COPYING for distribution information.

A vendor with these settings do not:

OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UIDPLUS CHILDREN NAMESPACE THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES SORT QUOTA IDLE ACL ACL2=UNION STARTTLS XMAGICTRASH] Courier-IMAP ready. Copyright 1998-2005 Double Precision, Inc. See COPYING for distribution information.

--

The differences here are that the one creating duplicates have ACL, ACL2=UNION and XMAGICTRASH in addition to the ones the other serves has. My MobileMe also has ACL and works, so that leaves the two other parameters. I am not sure if this is the culprit, but might be something for others to look into? Just open a terminal window and do a: telnet imap.yourserver.com 143 and look at the result.

While on the phone with AppleCare regarding the "password rejected" issue that numerous folks, including myself have been having, I mentioned the duplicate message issue. Second level support told me that Apple is quite aware of the duplicate email problem and working on a solution. Sorry to say that the "password rejected" issue is new to them, but that's a whole different message thread.

I was having the problem with my MobileMe account though - surely Mail.app should be interpreting at least that correctly?

Rangeshooter wrote:
While on the phone with AppleCare regarding the "password rejected" issue that numerous folks, including myself have been having, I mentioned the duplicate message issue. Second level support told me that Apple is quite aware of the duplicate email problem and working on a solution. Sorry to say that the "password rejected" issue is new to them, but that's a whole different message thread.

Oh, so the "password rejected" is another 10.6 problem is it? I thought that was just me.

NightFox wrote:
Oh, so the "password rejected" is another 10.6 problem is it? I thought that was just me.

And not just 10.6. Happened to me on 10.5 too.

Well I've finally found a foolproof solution. After having upgraded to Snow Leopard a couple of days after it was released and therefore having put up with the Mail.app problem for nearly 6 weeks I'm over it. If Apple could be bothered to let its customers know that it knows about this and is working on it that might be another thing. But bluntly there has been official disdain and silence where the customers are concerned.
I suggest that anyone who feels like I do should investigate Postbox. The interface still needs some work but it's reliable, feature packed and robust. It doesn't generate duplicates, triplicates...

It costs$29.95 at the moment but there is also a free 30 day trial to see if you like it.

Mail has gone from my Mac and good riddance.

Just for the record I have no relationship of any sort with the people who develop and sell Postbox and I have received no financial inducements of any sort from them -;)

P1

I tried the excellent Ernie Stapler's proposed solution (trashing the MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded3 file) and altering the read/write permissions on the newly-generated file yesterday evening, got what I was hoping would be the promised final re-download, but this morning, it had happened again. I'd also turned Mail off on the other computer on the network (a MacBook running Leopard). I still have an iPhone which checks some the same mail servers, but it's not set to Push, so only checks intermittently, when I actually use Mail on it, so would have to have been quite unlucky to have activated it at the same time as the Snow Leopard machine was checking the servers. Still, not impossible. Will avoid using Mail on the iPhone for the rest of the day, to see if the problem recurs.

-I tried just now to set my mail fetching to Manual in the preferences. My mail providers all support IDLE protocol, and so far this seems to work. Will let you know if this seems to hold the problem in place throughout the day.-

Hmm - I was too fast composing this post, it only takes much longer time before the duplicates arrive!...

Message was edited by: Egil Helland

Me too. I thought it was just me. Had to find and re-enter passwords for all my accounts - very annoying.

One possible help for the password issue ... I was having that for a while (on Leopard, not SL), and finally discovered that switching from port 25 to port 587 for POP access fixed it. Anything but port 25 seems to be the deal these days with many ISPs.

If that's any help ....