Mac Mail Big Sur Doesn't Correctly Display What It Is Doing

Feedback - Mail - Apple

MooneyTed wrote:

Mail used to correctly say what it was doing. Now it says, for example, "Saving 1 of 52 Drafts", although there are no drafts. It will stick with this for hours or days, then display "Moving .... Messages". It's just semi-permanently frozen displaying things it's not actually doing :-)

I have seen this on El Capitan, High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina and probably others as well but those are the ones we are currently using on Macs dating from 2008-2019. I don't see your message about saving drafts or moving messages, but will sometimes see "Downloading 1 of 30 messages" but nothing is downloading, and this downloading message can stay there indefinitely. I have found that quitting and reopening Mail typically clears the message, or rebooting always does. It seems harmless. Someday I will try booting into Safe Mode as that clears some caches and this seems to be something that Apple Mail remembers doing sometime in the past, maybe from a cache. It might be worth a try, but I tend to the belief of not trying to "fix" things that aren't "broken" and this seems to be harmless, although sometimes annoying.

MooneyTed wrote:

It's just semi-permanently frozen displaying things it's not actually doing :-)

Yes. I've seen it many times.

Has one tried to Rebuild in the Mailbox Menu ?