Problem with some emails not showing up in Mail application

Question

Problem with some emails not showing up in Mail application

I am not exactly sure when this problem started but it seems to be getting worse and there is not much logic to it. I basically have about 5 email accounts comming into the application. Sometimes though emails vanish in the inbox. Even if I do a search in the application I cannot find them. I can find them all when I use 'Spotlight' so I know they are there. I have tried rebuilding mail boxes and after that some old emails reappear but other ones have then vanished.

At the moment on one of my inboxs for an email account all the emails from yesterday back to Jan 2009 have disappeared but they are still there in Spotlight. Also some old unread emails now seem to have appeared which I am sure were not there before.

I am running Mail Version 2.1.3 (753.1). Anybody have any ideas on this problem and how I might sort it out?

Powerbook 15 G4, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on May 9, 2011 1:47 AM

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Answer 1

May 9, 2011 2:22 AM in response to Stewart Allen1

It does appear at the moment the problem does not effect my sent box as those emails appear to be all there. So the problem is just my inbox and now after looking again it all seems to be centred around the contents of one of my email accounts and not the other ones. It's a pop account and as I said before all the emails are on the hard drive but not all of them are in my inbox.

I have now tried everything on this page:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1907

and nothing worked. I have discovered where the issue is though. Under INBOX.mbox I have two folders containing the emails for that pop account. One is called 'Messages' and the other is called 'Messages-T0x6e03340-fkB5uT' The second folder contains 1888 emails. The first folder 'Messages' contains 9482 emails. The Mail application appears to be only reading a few of the emails in the first folder. In total I can only see 1735 emails in the inbox for this Pop account.

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Answer 2

glndi

Level 1

6 points

May 9, 2011 9:52 AM in response to Stewart Allen1

I too am missing emails in my inbox. In fact, I'm missing all the them!

Out of the blue today I received an error message saying Mail needed to shut down. When I opened it again, all my previous emails were gone, both from the inbox and from Mailbox folders I created.

From what I can tell they are still available (user/library/mail/POP), however I have no idea how to get them to show up again in my Mail program.

Help!

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Answer 3

BDAqua

Level 10

238,991 points

May 9, 2011 10:04 AM in response to Stewart Allen1

Not certain, but this can fix myriad Mail problems...

Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), it will try to repair your Disk Directory while the spinning radian is happening, so let it go, run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, then move these folder & file to the Desktop.

Move this Folder to the Desktop...

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Caches/Mail/

Move this file to the Desktop...

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail/Envelope Index

Reboot.

If that doesn't do it and you can afford to redo all your Rules, try these & reboot...

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist.backup

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Answer 4

glndi

Level 1

6 points

May 9, 2011 11:47 AM in response to BDAqua

Thanks BDAqua, this helped. After moving the Cache/Mail and Mail/Library Index to the desktop and then rebooting, I got a message for first time Mail users. It gave me the option to import my emails, which I did. They're all there - thanks so much!

I'm assuming I can delete those two folders from my desktop? Correct?

Thanks!

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Answer 5

May 10, 2011 7:23 AM in response to BDAqua

Thanks.

I have been doing some digging around and I found this post first of all:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1514579

That perfectly describes my problem.

I then checked further post by the same person and found this 10 months later:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2353764

I see on there you replied to him and also suggested this:

If nothing helps, make copies & Import emlx to mbox, See if this helps...

http://www.cosmicsoft.net/emlxconvert.html

Do you think this is worth a go? I stupidly tried rebuilding again before discovering these two threads. Out of 10,000 ish emails that are still there on my harddrive for this email account I am now the proud owner of just 33 in my Mail application!

Thanks for your help.

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Answer 6

BDAqua

Level 10

238,991 points

May 10, 2011 10:44 AM in response to glndi

Yes, you no longer need them.

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Answer 7

BDAqua

Level 10

238,991 points

May 10, 2011 10:47 AM in response to Stewart Allen1

Yes, I'd try the Import to mbox.

For safety

On Mail...

First Quit Mail, then I'd backup these two Mail folders, by right clicking on them in the Finder, then choose Archive/Compress.

Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail

Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail Downloads

(Could be a different folder here if you chose such in Mail Prefs)

Right click on that Mail folder, choose archive, you'll get everything in the folder, and the folder itself in a file called Mail.zip, move it to a safe place, same for the Mail Downloads folder... only the plist is separate.

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

For Address Book, quit AB...

Files...

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.plist

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.abd.plist

Folders...

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Caches/com.apple.AddressBook/

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