Mail.app displaying wrong email messages.

Question

Mail.app displaying wrong email messages.

My Mail.app is setup as an IMAP client for my Gmail and Google Apps accounts. I recently discovered that on old messages, in this case anything older than a few months, the message showing up in the inbox does not correctly correspond to the email message in the preview window. An example would be, in the inbox list I select a message from John Smith on February 20, 2011. The preview window below shows me a message from Mary Johnson dated August 3, 2006.

Is there a way to fix this without having to delete the accounts and redownload all the messages? I've got about 22,000 messages across three accounts and would like to avoid having to download them all again.

This problem is isolated to my iMac. I'm on 10.6.6 and my Mail.app is 4.4. I have a Macbook on 10.5.8 with Mail 3.6 and this problem does not appear there. Both have the same account settings.

Posted on May 27, 2011 4:00 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

etresoft

Level 8

46,530 points

May 27, 2011 4:04 PM in response to Terence Nguyen

Select the Mailbox and choose "Rebuild" from the Mailbox menu.

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Answer 2

May 27, 2011 4:08 PM in response to etresoft

Perfect, thank you!

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Answer 3

Nov 11, 2013 9:01 PM in response to Terence Nguyen

I'm having the same problem, but the rebuild is not resolving it. I'm on OS 10.9 and Mail 7.0. The mail accounts are IMAP gmail accounts.

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Answer 4

M_Gerges

Level 1

4 points

Dec 1, 2013 8:02 AM in response to Terence Nguyen

I have the same issue, it's driving me crazy. Gmail imap on 10.9

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Answer 5

Dec 20, 2013 1:07 PM in response to Terence Nguyen

I am having problems as well and have tried rebuilding as well as deleting the account and setting it up again. Any other ideas would be really helpful.

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Answer 6

M_Gerges

Level 1

4 points

Dec 21, 2013 3:10 AM in response to Terence Nguyen

Well, nothing helped, even with the latest 2 updates where Apple states they fixed bugs in Mail app. Thus I just bought "AirMail" it's very cheap and works awsome with full gmail support.

NB. I've used MS outlook for a while but it was awful, now totally satisfied with "Airmail" it supports notification, very light weight, etc.

cons: I found that it cached all the attachments I have on my gmail.

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Answer 7

Crankpaw

Level 1

4 points

Jan 28, 2014 7:55 PM in response to Terence Nguyen

None of this worked for me either. I got thunderbird.

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Answer 8

ahlstro

Level 1

15 points

Feb 20, 2014 8:19 AM in response to adchartier

Yesterday I had this problem in Mail on Mavericks, with a Gmail imap account. Rebuilding the folder did not fix it. But going to the All Mail (archive) folder and rebuilding that (overnight, 30,000 messages) did solve the problem. Before I left work for the evening I kept track of the progress using the Activity window, so if you have trouble seeing that it's doing anything while it's rebuilding, you might want to check that.

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Answer 9

Feb 16, 2016 3:19 AM in response to ahlstro

This fixed it for me. Thank you!

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Answer 10

Jul 31, 2017 2:34 PM in response to Terence Nguyen

I know this is an old thread. My solution was turning off Avast protection for Mail (left enabled for system).

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Answer 11

BlakeW

Level 1

8 points

Nov 8, 2017 3:29 PM in response to TimGolobic

THIS. Thanks so much for posting this solution — it had gotten to the point where I couldn't trust Mail to reliably deliver messages at all. Now it's redeemed!

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