Mail not showing new messages in inbox

Thank you!!! After a month of looking for solutions I ran across your comment:

I was having the same problem as listed in the original post. Highlighting the mail account and selecting "Get Info" with a right click showed all the new messages on the server that were not showing up in my Mac mail inbox. I saw one e-mail with "sender unknown". I deleted it from the server and all my new mail showed up right after the deletion. It seems one bad e-mail on the server can mess everything up.

Its a GREAT day now!!

Highlighting Mail Account + Get info + delete "sender unknown" from server worked for me, too.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I've been going crazy with this for weeks now. Same problem. Only one account of three wouldn't retrieve mail, but iPhone and iPad working just fine. Web mail, just fine. Tried absolutely everything. I couldn't actually find any messages on the server that /looked/ corrupt, so ended up just deleting everything in my server inbox. Now it's working properly again, and the mysterious thousands of messages popping up in "Mail Activity" have disappeared. Very pleased. Thanks again.

Fixed this problem on iphone 5.

symptoms...

Can create new and send ( successfully ).

No new email appears - inbox remains empty

email folders all present ( all empty )

tried resetting iphone - no effect

tried deleting email account and recreating - no effect

tried removing iCloud - no effect.

eventually, held finger on inbox for around 5 seconds - everything came back to life.

hope this helps

My problem is even weirder! I can not get Mail to show a particular email, but others are appearing. The email I am expecting is from a trusted source and I have had no trouble receiving it in the past until today. It has been sent to two different addresses of mine, and I can see it on the servers when I use "get info".

I am able to download it to my iPad, just not to my iMac. I have tried all the solutions mentioned here, except removing the com.apple.mail.plist preference because that file does not appear in my library for some reason.

Any ideas would be welcome.

Hi Gary, have you tried this?

Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, reboot when it completes.

(Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive & clear caches.)

Restart & open Mail, highlight that account & chose Rebuild from Mail's Mailbox menu item.

If that fails...

Make a new Smart Mailbox that only includes Unread Mails, do they show in that Smartbox?

Thanks BDAqua but that didn't work. I set up the smart mailbox as you also suggested and the email did not appear. I can still see it on the server and I have received all the other emails shown, just this one email doesn't want to get delivered. Weird!

It is a test email I created myself from a Wordpress blog that I have and I have always received them in the past, so it is not a "spam" issue.

WordPress has big security problem, google is blocking 1,000s of WP sites... might your DNS servers be googles?

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-blocks-thousands-wordpress-sites-follo wing-malware-attack/122203/

No, it's on a private server. I'm pretty sure this must be a Mail problem on my iMac because I am able to receive the email in question on my iPad.

Agreed, must be... might start a new topic to get the most helpers in on it.

To go back to the original posting:

We had this same problem today on a new iMac running OS X Yosemite. Clicked on Get Mail, got the sounds of new messages, then nothing in the inbox. Even messages that were there before were gone. We couldn't find them in any other folder. However, the Flagged folder did show the flagged messages that had been in the Inbox, but we couldn't move them into the Inbox (drag and drop, but nothing showed up). The mail was coming from a POP account at Comcast.

Here is what fixed the problem: We did a hard Quit on the Mail app (hold mouse button down on the icon in the tray; a menu comes up; select Quit). Then restarted Mail and all Inbox messages were there.

Anybody at Apple know what causes this? Is it on the bug list to investigate and fix?

If it is on a list to fix somewhere, it won't get fixed for 10.5, likely not even 10.6/10.7, most often I'd say it's caused by Directory or file corruption, or even stale cache files, sometimes a Rebuild if the Mailbox will help, especially after doing a Safe Boot to correct things.

Thank you. One other symptom that I hadn't noticed is that after the Inbox messages reappeared we lost all of the messages in the Sent folder (except for one that was flagged). Unfortunately Rebuild and Safe Boot didn't solve that problem.

We are new to Mac and so I'm surprised that this type of problem (serious, possibly connected to lack of robustness in the file system or mail database file) has been reported over several years with no reliable fix from Apple. We can be critical of Windows for lots of things, but I never lost an email message.

I appreciate your taking the time to try to help.

Yes, it's pretty sad, though it affects a small number of people, it doesn't help those people. 😟

If you'd like more help on this, I recommend starting a new topic so we can narrow in on your details. 🙂

Thanks for the suggestion. The problem was fully resolved by calling Apple support (we're still within the 90 day free phone support window). I found Apple support to be excellent and I learned that Time Machine is integrated with Mail so I was able to recover the entire Sent folder from before the time of the problem. Once you know how to do it, it is very easy. I'm just glad I set up Time Machine with an external disk to store the backups.