Mac Mail acting normal, but actually losing drafts and sent messages

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Level 1

47 points

Mac Mail acting normal, but actually losing drafts and sent messages

I have been noticing that sometimes, I will send messages in Mail, but they do not appear in sent messages, the recipient does not receive it, and the message is not in Drafts.

Additionally, any drafts that I have written will not be saved if I end up quitting Mail while in this messed up state.

Its hard to catch because no error message is given and everything seems to work normally in terms of the "send" animation and the "send" audio.

When I catch that this is happening, I always wonder how many messages have actually not been sent.

This is scary because in my job, I send at least 50 emails a day.

This seems to have started around the time I upgraded to 13.1 (22C65).

MacBook Pro 15″

Posted on Feb 1, 2023 4:18 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

BDAqua

Level 10

245,189 points

Feb 1, 2023 4:49 PM in response to Alias7

Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode?

Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.

If you have no POP accounts & they’re all IMAP accounts then in Mail’s Mailbox menu choose Rebuild.

Mail>Preferences>Accounts>Your Account>Mailbox Behaviors, what path is Drafts Mailbox set to?

Setting it to an On My Mac Drafts box generally cures it if you don't need Drafts sent to other devices.

Try setting to an On My Mac Box.

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Answer 2

Alias7 Author

Level 1

47 points

Feb 25, 2023 3:35 PM in response to Alias7

Thanks so much for your assistance.

Going to Safe Boot mode and waiting for the problem to show up is not an option because the problem is very infrequent, and I can't stay in Safe Boot mode for very long due to work requirements. But since you said it clears lots of caches, I went into Safe Mode for a while and then restarted.

Yeah I have only IMAP accounts. I chose Rebuild, but it didn't seem to do anything.

The path for Drafts is set to [Gmail]/drafts. I have it there because sometimes I want to see the draft on my phone. But if its safer to set it to Mac, then ok I will try that. However, I don't think that will fix the issue because if it didn't work for Gmail/Drafts, then I doubt it would work for local storage. That is because I think after I hit send, the draft gets deleted because its no longer a draft. The problem is the message doesn't actually send.

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Answer 3

Alias7 Author

Level 1

47 points

Feb 26, 2023 4:45 PM in response to BDAqua

That's the thing. It disappears completely.

As I described, its not in outbox, drafts, sent or anywhere. Its just gone. At some point prior to drafting the message, Mail must stop doing its normal background things, but appears to work fine until I happen to check if my messages are appearing in the Sent folder.

Usually restarting Mail will fix it, but sometimes it takes a couple restarts of Mail. But I would hate to draft a very long email and lose it.

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