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Drafts get stuck, and can't be deleted. Inbox messages sometimes reappear.

I've been using Mail for years, but recently started experiencing a weird bug. Last week I moved to a new Mac, and when I moved all my Mail files and preferences over, I started to notice a few glitches in the Mail experience:

1. Drafts stay in the Drafts folder, even after being sent. This used to be a problem off and on for years, and then I unchecked the "store drafts on server" option, and it stopped. Those checkboxes remain unchecked, but the problem persists.

2. Faux-drafts (ones that copies of sent mail) can't be deleted. This is when it starts to get really weird. I delete the message, and it disappears from the file list, but the message count stays the same in the mailbox panel. When I switch to another mailbox and back again, the message is still there. When I select the message and hit delete, I don't see any activity in the Activity window. Sometimes I can delete it by opening it, closing it, and saying "Don't save" when the dialog box pops up. Sometimes I have to send the message to get it out of there.

3. Actual drafts (unsent messages) will sometimes disappear if save the draft, quit Mail, and restart. They're just gone.

4. I will delete messages from the Inbox, and they'll reappear next time I choose that mailbox, or if I quit and restart the app. Sometimes I have to go into the me.com or gmail.com interface to get them actually deleted.

5. Messages sometimes don't get sent. I haven't analyzed this problem as much, and it's hard to replicate, but I'm sure that a few messages I sent yesterday never got sent, as they aren't in my Sent folder and the recipients told me they never got them.

I have tried:

- Deleting the Mail preferences
- Rebuilding the mailboxes

And neither of those things helped. It's really causing a lot of disruption in my workflow, to the point that I'm considering abandoning Mail indefinitely until I can get it worked out. If anyone has ideas on what I can try to fix it, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks,
-Sandy

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.3)

Posted on May 25, 2010 12:12 PM

Reply
18 replies

Sep 22, 2010 3:44 PM in response to santheo

Bump. I've been dealing with the "drafts stay in Drafts folder" issue for the better part of a year. Every single day I see a ramped-up number in the Drafts count, sigh in frustration, then go delete the "drafts" that I've already sent (after I double-check to make sure I did send them, of course). Who knows how much time I've wasted with this stupid issue.

Apple, are you kidding me with this? People have been having this problem since 2006. FIX IT ALREADY.

Nov 14, 2010 7:09 AM in response to santheo

"I will delete messages from the Inbox, and they'll reappear next time I choose that mailbox, or if I quit and restart the app. Sometimes I have to go into the me.com or gmail.com interface to get them actually deleted."


This has been a long-standing frustration for me. What I've discovered is that sometimes Mail seems to "fall behind" -- meaning that if I am going through a bunch of e-mail, deleting messages quickly one-after-the-other, Mail slows way down and seems to get bogged down in doing everything that I've asked. If I get impatient and, say, force-Quit, then restart Mail, many of those e-mails that I deleted are now back in the In-box, simply (I think) because Mail never got to them to actually delete them.

Related to that is that if I do a bunch of work on one computer (e.g., responding to and deleting messages from my e-mail box), it doesn't always delete the messages off of the exchange server. When I go to another computer and use Mail, many of those "deleted" message then re-appear. The solution to this that I've found is to Rebuild my In box before leaving the computer, which seems to then delete the messages off the Exchange server.

Drafts get stuck, and can't be deleted. Inbox messages sometimes reappear.

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