Mail Messages Suddenly Blank!

Just found this unwelcome surprise today: blank emails in 5 of my most important accounts while other accounts are fine. I checked the Library/Mail/Pop-myemailaccount folder and had only six messages in each file. Tried rebuild, still only six messages.

Whatever is causing this in Apple Mail needs to fixed immediately. Haven't backed up for a month so lost a month's mail. I've been removing it after a week on the server but obviously won't do that again since I can't trust email on my computer now.

Having a more recent backup would have helped some but this means I have to backup every day and worry about restoring email. I have too many clients corresponding by email to have to worry about Apple Mail failing me like this.

Hey, Apple guys monitoring discussions: Fix this, please! We need help.

Whatever is causing this in Apple Mail needs to fixed immediately.

This kind of behavior is caused by some kind of corruption in your Mail data files, not a bug in Mail needing to be fixed by Apple. This thread started more than a year ago, and some solutions have been posted in it. If you have not read and tried any, do so. If the problem persists, start your own topic, with full details about what you're seeing and what you have tried, rather than tacking on to the end of a very old topic.

Having a more recent backup would have helped some but this means I have to backup every day

If your data has value, you should be backing up every day. Corruption on the hard drive - which you very well may have given your problem - could be causing data to be overwritten as we "speak." Your hard drive could fail at any time. Theft or fire could put your data permanently beyond the reach of possible restoration. If you don't appropriately back up valued data, you have nobody to blame but yourself when (not if) it is lost.

Followup: Ha! I've been having trouble with my Mail accounts for months. Had to rebuild several times. Plus old long-deleted phantom email accounts were trying to access the server so my host company kept blocking my IP address thinking I was a hacker. (Took new com.apple.mail.plist to fix that.) At that time (over 2 weeks ago), my hosting company suggested I update email settings on all my accounts, @ instead of the old + symbol, setting a custom port (26) instead of default, etc., and my mail had been coming through just fine. Until today. Now I find in my User/Library/Mail folder, some but not all accounts have two folders for one account, one with @ and one with + and both have been storing incoming and sent messages...until today. I also discovered I had lost (blank) messages on more than the 5 accounts as I thought earlier. Oddly enough, some of the newly created folders are NOT active. Importing did NOT work so, for each account I opened the INBOX.mbox/Messages and the Sent Messages.mbox/Messages folders and dragged those files into the account folders which were active folders (had the latest file dates). Then I deleted the inactive folders.

There was one account with duplicate folders that did not have any sent messages except for today so I did lose those but other than that, I think I've recovered everything. Not sure why opening my Mail Preferences and changing settings would cause this mess. If changing settings in Mail Preferences creates two folders doe one account, that sounds like a real problem to me. (BTW, using OS 10.6.7 BTW and Mail 4.5 on MacBook Pro.)

Gees, Thomas, thanks for that. I don't consider a message posted April 7, 2011, to be an old message. Also, I had tried several suggestions without success before I discovered the duplicate folders. Now I'm sorry I posted that reply when I found the problem, BEFORE I saw your post. I admit when I'm wrong but I see now I shouldn't even have voiced my earlier comment.

Thanks for the warning about all the terrible things that could happen to my Mac. Yes, I should be backing up every day. Yes, Apple provides the best products in the world. I hope you don't post that response to everyone who's honest enough to admit they don't back up every day or to everyone else (there were others) who thought there might be a problem for Apple to address.

Thanks for reminding me that there are other forums which are much friendlier and where I will post from now on.

I don't consider a message posted April 7, 2011, to be an old message.

The first message on this topic was posted March 11, 2010. Posting on a thread like this is not the best way to get your question answered, as many folks won't even bother looking in here anymore.

As to the rest of your message, I'm quite impressed with the thinness of your skin if I managed to offend you. It would probably best if you were to avoid forums in general if you can't handle that kind of response, because you could very easily have gotten far worse.

Thank you callipygian!

I was experiencing this problem with a few of my email. In my particular situation the messages that were originally blank were imported back and now viewable, thank you so much!