Multiple Copies of Emails

Gardener67 wrote:
Dear geevee,

No guarantees (as this problem seems to resurface after having been "fixed" for a while), but my system has been running normally for 48 hours now after I tried the following procedure...

Go to Mail Preferences, select the Accounts tab, and then the Advanced menu. For each account, deselect each of the 3 checkboxes at the top, and then save the results (the program prompts you to save when you move on to the next account or when you try to leave the Advanced menu). Then revisit each account and reselect the checkboxes you want and save the results.

Gardener67

Just tried that and it seems to have worked for me - I was expecting even when this was resolved that I'd have to do some work to get rid of all the duplicates, but they instantly disappeared! Let's just see if I get any more...

A couple of comments on your post where my experience differed (I only have my Mobileme account set up):

1. Although there are 3 tick boxes at the top of the Advanced tab, the third (Compact Mailboxes Automatically) was greyed out for me, so I could only deselect/reselect the top two ("Enable this Account" and "Include when Automatically Checking..." I actually suspect that it only needs the first option to be deselected and reselected, but can't check now it's fixed

2. The settings don't save when you leave the "Advanced" sub-menu, you have to leave the main "Accounts" menu for changes to register.

Anyway, many thanks and fingers crossed!

Hmm, spoke too soon. Worked on my Mac Pro but not on my MacBook. Odd.

It's probably a red herring, but I was using my MacBook in a different time zone when this problem seems to have started.

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OH! Just changed my MacBook back to my normal time zone (I had "Set time automatically using current location" selected before, now it's set manually) and all my duplicates disappeared! I'm sure this must be a coincidence and a delayed response to the changes I made in the post above, but thought I'd better mention it!

Of the various suggested solutions on here the only one I haven't tried is the one about deleting and re-entering all the rules (OK I admit it, I can't bear the thought of something so laborious ... )

But anyway none of the others has worked for me.

My specifics: macbook2.16 | 10.6.1 | 4 POP accounts (two of which have the issue) | I've always had all accounts set to delete from server immediately | I only check e-mail from one computer, though from two alternating locations

This topic is flagged as having been "answered." Must I look through nine pages of posts to figure out where the "answer" is?

It would appear the answer is; there is no answer.

Yeah, that's how it appears to me, too. What a colossal pain.

I'm delighted that this worked for you, and I hope the fix holds. (It's still holding here.)

Thanks for your comments on and corrections to the procedure. I agree that "Enable this account" is probably the only checkbox that matters. Perhaps if someone else tries the procedure he/she might test this.

Unfortunately this fix (clearing, saving, then re-enabling the checkboxes under "advanced") did not help for me. Neither did all of the existing duplicates disappear, nor were new duplicates prevented from arriving.

OK, I tried the 'fix' with un-enabling the accounts and re-enabling them.

No luck- 800 emails were downloaded twice before I could take the offending account (Yahoo) offline again....

No luck for me

Apple just called back and said they are looking into this issue. They do admit that it is something they are now aware of and to keep an eye out for Software Updates.

The ONLY fix they have so far is to remove the MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded3 file.

Personally, I saved all my emails to a new folder and deleted my email account. Then I recreated the email using IMAP instead of POP3 and the issue went away.

But it's good to know they are now aware of the problem and working on a fix.

I have tried everything from deleting my "mobileme" account to reinstalling my accounts to deleting the "messagedownloadfile" and it still is duplicating my emails. What is the "envelope-index" file that's in the folder? It goes crazy when it is downloading all the duplicate emails. It is also over 6.6 mb in size.

I called Apple last week and they told me to delete the "mobileme" account in the accounts which I did but still is duplicating emails. The agent said that they weren't sure what is causing this problem but thought this was the problem. Well that was a waste of time and advice!

Well sorry to say that none of the fixes mentioned here makes any difference to me. What's more, after setting up new IMAP accounts I find that the problem still continues, even with those new accounts.
Currently in my Mail app all the accounts are switched to "off line" and that's the way it will stay until Apple delivers a fix. I'm glad they have told others in this thread that they are "aware" of this problem - you'd have to be Blind Freddy not to be.
This problem is making it nearly impossible for me to operate effectively and 20,000+ emails a day downloaded because of it absolutely blows my data limits.

While I understand it's frustrating, I had hundreds and hundreds of emails I had to sort through several times, I think there are simpler ways to go about fixing problems.

I'm not sure why you need 20,000+ emails on your servers, why not just save them on your computer in another folder created in mail and delete everything off your servers? This way if the problem continues, it may only be downloading a handful of emails.

Also, I am not sure why IMAP would be doing this.

JeridHill wrote:
While I understand it's frustrating, I had hundreds and hundreds of emails I had to sort through several times, I think there are simpler ways to go about fixing problems.

I'm not sure why you need 20,000+ emails on your servers, why not just save them on your computer in another folder created in mail and delete everything off your servers? This way if the problem continues, it may only be downloading a handful of emails.

Also, I am not sure why IMAP would be doing this.

That is entirely the point: I don't have 20,000 emails on the server or anything like that number. But when Mail decides to download between 3 and 8 copies of every email at a time and then do it again...and again...then all of a sudden that's how many emails have crossed the network and that's how many are in your inbox.

I travel a lot and sometimes I'm at an airstrip or other place where the only access I have to my mail is via a browser and I need access to mail from the servers - thus mail remains and will continue to remain on the server. Secondly I have no intention of relying on Mail to do anything at the moment, so even if I wanted to delete off the server I wouldn't do that at the moment.

I'm with you on the IMAP accounts but others have also had problems with IMAP.

I too am having this problem, but it seems only on my imac at work. The two other macbooks I installed snow leopard on seem fine. (as far as I noticed). I have 4 different email accounts on four totally different/separate server/email services, and they are all doing the same thing, so I know it's a problem with mail on this machine.

Unchecking the boxes on each account and then rechecking them did not work for me. I'm really hesitant to try the other suggested fixes as they didn't look like they worked for many people anyhow.

For now I have my work imac set to download/delete all mail off the server immediately. It's quite a drag, (cause I can't get the downloaded mail on my other machine or iphone) but the only sensible option as I see it since I don't want to have to delete a bunch of duplicate emails every hour or so.

Apple we need a fix!