Mail Messages Suddenly Blank!

Sorry but that didn't fix the issue. Now all the folders for that account are empty with no emails in them. I know the emails are safe as everything is stored on the server. Everything worked like you described except for the end result which still has empty email messages.

go to your ~/Library/Mail/ and look inside your account mailboxes to see if the messages are there or not

FOUND THE SOLUTION!
At least for me. I had the exact same issue come up today. Tried all of the suggestions on this thread, but nothing worked. Then, while looking through my mail folder (user/Library/Mail) I noticed several "Messages" folders, the main one and a couple other with long extensions tagged on the ends of them, "Messages-T0x1018b94a0-3bLNOj". I also noticed that two of the three Messages folders had nothing in them, while the third and last one did. On a hunch, I quit out of Mail, deleted the two folders with nothing in them and renamed the one that had files in it, ie. "Messages-T0x1018b94a0-3bLNOj" to "Messages". I had to do this in each "POP-" and "Mailboxs" folders I had an issue with. Once I opened up Mail again, viola! It's a Christmas miracle...all of my blank and then disappearing messages are back.

Hope this helps everyone else with the problem.

This just started happening to me this week. Several new emails now appear blank after I've put them in a folder under "on my mac". So far no emails in the inbox appear this way. I tried rebuilding but they disappeared. I can find them on my server but that's inconvenient when I'm working offline.

I looked in users/library/mail as suggested but didn't see any folders with odd tags or anything. Help! This is my work computer and I can't afford to lose messages or productivity.

Same as Andy! Yesterday I update with the last Java patch!

Suddenly almost all messages of one account (University Server) went blank -> Rebuild it -> Lost it. Only 6 messages of the last 3 days appear.

Of another account (they are all POP) almost everything vanished (before July, 14 2009), but of my second Yahoo!-Account nothing disappeared. So my Hotmail shows until 1999 (everything), too.

But my messages are still on the server - besides the Sent ones!

I deleted the Envelope Index, but it downloaded the messages too fast to be true - it is 2GB of messages and I´m on a lame hotel Wifi, so 15 seconds is too fast to really download all again.

Please, figure this out!

Thanks!

One of my clients is experiencing the same issue. I just wanted to confirm that deleting the Envelope Index and then importing all the mail had the same effect as doing Mailbox ==> Rebuild. The folder that was full of blank emails now just had 6 emails in it, the blanks were all removed.

I tried navigating to ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/The Folder_With_BlankMessages.mbox

That folder only showed 6 messages in it, rather than the hundreds that the user moved into that folder earlier today.

Looking for a solution to retrieve her mail and figure out what caused it to disappear.

Update:
After further restarts and permissions repairs, all of the user's "On My Mac" folders were showing up with blank emails. Every single email appeared to be missing.

Solution:
• Quit out of Apple Mail
• Delete ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index
• Launch Mail.app
• It will prompt you to import all your mail, let it

This fixed the corruption in the SQL database. All mail that exists in the ~/Library/Mail folder was re-imported successfully. The "On My Mac" folders are now populated with working email. Mail appears to be stable and we're able to move messages around in different folders and have them work. There are not any messages that show up as blank.

I could not find the messages that were originally lost anywhere in ~/Library/Mail. They appear to be unrecoverable.

We're restoring from backups to recover whatever messages were lost.

my challenge in importing all the emails again is that I have three years of work emails in subfolders. I don't want import thousands of emails and have to resort them. Isn't there a way for me to identify an email and have Mail reload it or just repair all the bad ones?

Hey Andy,

The user I was supporting had 10+ GB of email sorted in hundreds of folders and sub-folders. Performing the fix above maintained all of the sorting that she had done. It took about 2 minutes for her computer (Core 2 Duo iMac) to re-import everything. Thanks for requesting clarification.

Thanks Callypigian,

I followed your instructions. It was simple and it was fast. I had hoped the emails that disappeared after doing the rebuild would come back but they didn't. The good news is that I can't find any more blank ones.

I don't suppose you know how to get those back, do you?

I was not able to find the lost emails. The only way I found to restore them would be from a backup of your ~/Library/Mail folder. If you have TimeMachine or any other backup software, restore the folder containing the lost emails to your desktop and import them back into Apple Mail with the File ==> Import Mailboxes command. You'll likely get some duplicates, but extra emails is better than lost emails.

Well, as i said earlier: after rebuild there are no more blank mails - because those have disappeared now completely (they have not been recovered).

I am worried about the sent mails, as the received ones are still in the server and I can access them through my browser. But the sent mails never got saved there, only on my MBP.

But still I am annoyed that Mail won´t synchronize the accounts so that at least the emails stored on the servers will be visible on my MBP. And again: one Yahoo account shows this problem, the other one is fine. My university mailbox is suddenly only 6 mails big (from 9th of november until today).

And maybe anybody had the same observation: I installed the last Java update just before it happened! Or anybody installed the update to 10.6.5. and had any changes? (I´m trying to, but I can´t get a complete download until now).

Help is more than appreciated!

Dani.

Worked here! Thank you, dude!

I'm having the same issue here. So far, it's happening only with newly received emails on my Exchange account. It doesn't seem to happen on my Gmail account. Often, closing and reopening the message viewer will force the new message's contents to load. I've tried both of the solutions here, but neither worked. I saw no garbled folders in my Library.

Same issue here, and unfortunately because my external hard drive hasn't had enough space to back-up for a couple months (and I've been without cash to get a new one) I've lost a lot of emails.
It seems to me that there must be a way to get them back though.
My emails' message bodies disappeared after I removed a totally separate email account, a work one that I no longer need that had different incoming and outgoing servers.
At first all the mail in the inbox was showing up as subject lines only, while the sent and junk mail folders were gone completely (also not showing up in the library).
After I tried sending an email the sent folder reappeared but with the same problem (subjects with no message bodies)
And then I tried the 'repair' function after which everything disappeared.
Now new emails show up correctly but the old ones are gone, no extra folders in the libraries, nothing.

I'm definitely no expert but it seems to me that they must have gone somewhere (the fact that the sent emails' subject lines reappeared after sending a new email leads me to think this)
I just have no idea where...


Also I have alot of the missing emails on my ipod touch, but I have no idea if it is even possible to get them from the ipod back onto my mac...? They are no longer on the server either.

Oh I should add that right before all the message bodies disappeared I was trying to delete an email, when I hit the delete button it went grey and the number switched to zero but the email remained, if I minimized mail and then brought it back up to the front the email would show up as unread. Strange

Message was edited by: TSkross