A Mac Mail Mailbox Mystery

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A Mac Mail Mailbox Mystery

Hoping someone here can offer a suggestion re some very strange behavior I’m suddenly encountering using Mail (v16.0) on my new M1 Max 14” 2021 MacBookPro (running Ventura 13.4).

When I first got the new machine several months ago, I imported my Mailboxes from my earlier laptop (a 2012 13” MacBookPro, still in use). Over the years I’ve created a LOT of custom Mailboxes in which to store messages relating to different people and projects, in order to have an easy-to-access cyber “paper trail” I can quickly refer to, without having to search through thousands of Inbox items.

All those custom Mailboxes seemed to be working fine on their new hardware home, until I recently needed to create some new mailboxes into which I could drag e-messages relating to some new projects. While the old mailboxes continue to work fine, I suddenly noticed that the content of any messages I drag from my Inbox into one of these NEW mailboxes immediately vanishes! The header remains, including the size estimate for the message (173 KB; 4.4MB; whatever) but the lower pane in which the actual message should be displaying is completely blank.

More annoying (and concerning) is that if I hit Undo, or manually drag the message back out of these newly created mailboxes, the content does not reappear. If the same message is dragged from my Inbox into one of the older “pre-existing” custom Mailboxes I’d created, then no problem. the e-mail’s contents remain intact. But place the same message into one of the new Mailboxes, and the contents immediately disappear — even though their size is still being shown in the information pane above.

Fortunately the full message remains visible if I access my e-mail through a web browser online, even after those same contents appear to have vanished on my laptop in Mail.

This one’s really got me scratching my head — any troubleshooting thoughts or suggestions would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks — John B.

MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 13.4

Posted on Jul 9, 2023 11:23 PM

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Answer 1

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John Galt

Level 10

147,354 points

Jul 10, 2023 6:01 AM in response to John Bertram

That's an odd problem for sure. Try rebuilding the affected Mailbox, or all Mailboxes, according to Rebuild mailboxes in Mail on Mac - Apple Support. That action causes those email messages to become downloaded from the server again. Since you verified their contents are intact on the server, it should cause those contents to be restored.

If that doesn't work though I'm out of ideas short of removing the affected Mail accounts, and adding them again. That procedure is described in the three numbered steps in If you can’t send or receive email on your Mac - Apple Support.

Be sure to heed the Important note embedded in its Step 1. In your position I would be prepared for the possibility those messages could become lost, leaving only copies on the server(s) you are using, and requiring a lot of effort recreating the organizational structure you need.

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Answer 2

John Bertram Author

Level 1

140 points

Jul 11, 2023 10:17 PM in response to John Galt

Thanks for writing. I was not aware of the "Rebuild Mailbox" feature, so tried it out then tested the result using some unimportant mailing list messages in my Inbox. Was initially delighted that it actually seemed to work -- but a few more tests revealed my optimism was premature. The same problem of disappearing (or at least "suddenly invisible") content in messages that I drag into most of my numerous custom Mailboxes persists -- and not only in new Mailbox folders I've created recently, but also in many of the older Mailboxes into which I've been storing specific project-related messages for years.

Couple of interesting points:

1) When this does happen, the option to Undo the Move command is greyed out and unavailable, so I can only try manually dragging the now content-free message back into the Inbox. But no matter where it's moved to, the body of the message stays blank, while the subject header and the message size indicator remain as before.

2) I've noticed at the bottom of the column in which all the Mailboxes reside there is now a status message saying "Moving Messages", and immediately below that a counter reading "1 of [whatever]". It's now up to around 40, but always "1 of...", with no apparent progress being made. Is there some way to manually cancel that operation? Quitting and relaunching Mail certainly doesn't seem to change anything (and the slowly increasing total does seem to roughly conform to the number of times I've tried dragging messages into and back out of my custom Mailboxes over the past several days, in an effort to troubleshoot this bizarre and increasingly frustrating issue!)

My incoming and outgoing messages still seem to be flowing just fine; the problems only happen when I try to move the messages I want to keep into the custom Mailbox folders I've created for that purpose, and which all seemed to work fine up until a few days ago, even though to my knowledge nothing has changed about my system.

Very strange.

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A Mac Mail Mailbox Mystery

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