Missing emails in Mail - Lion deleting them?

my head hurts

SilentAlex wrote:

my head hurts

Take 2 aspirin and lie down in a darkened room.

I cant understand how Apple can let this problem continue for such a long time. I have clients who depend on there email and it keeps dissappearing and then randomly re appears. All of the time it can be seen on the server using a web browser.

Anyone got any ideas ?

Apple are you there ?

Nothing has been documented here that is in any way the fault of Apple or Mail. Results with mix ups on POP vs IMAP would be the same with any email client.

Ernie

Rick Fry wrote:

I cant understand how Apple can let this problem continue for such a long time. I have clients who depend on there email and it keeps dissappearing and then randomly re appears. All of the time it can be seen on the server using a web browser.

Anyone got any ideas ?

Apple are you there ?

You're issues are almost certainly of your making.

1 Are your accounts POP or Imap,

2 Are they set correctly on each and every client accessing them,

3 Are they set identically on every client accessing them.

4 If Gmail have you taken the time to Map the correct Google labels to Mail folders.

Just got off the phone with Apple Tech Support 2Tier.

I deleted all my Rules from Mail. That seems help. Funny that I had no Rules at iCloud-webmail nor iPad Mail. Only on my MacBook Pro. And I hadn't touched them in years.

Since most of these problems with lost emails - especially from sent folders involve a newly acquired Lion - I would tend to disagree with you. Conflicting IMAP and POP account problems should have been addressed in Lion/Apple Mail updating and apparently haven't been - and probably never will. Considering that you can trace a general problems in lost emails in Apple Mail (numerous sources of problems) in the Community back to at least 2005 - I would tend to disagree with you in general. Apple Mail programing, updating and error resolution in general is a well and independ reviewer documented programing embarassment to Apple - whose focus is now almost entirely on new product iPhone and iPad development, rather than servicing existing products. In spite of new product innovation - failing to service existing products is not a nealthy characteristic for any company desiring longevity. Though I have been an Apple consumer for years, when my last Mac Book Pro I'll be looking for a computer company that actually services their software and hardware products. If Apple is the best there is, IMO we consumers are in serious straits.

My reading and reviewing such reports goes back much earlier than 2005. The conflicts I refer to are those resulting from user introduced conflicts. No software will cure those.

I have numerous IMAP and POP accounts, and never any such problems.

Good luck!

Ernie

Ernie,

I have never had problems with Snow Leopard either - though I have both IMAP and POP accounts under the same Mail account, but my wife who just recently bought a new Mac Book Pro to replace her old one that had the typical heat stroke problems that have plagued Macs so long (also an unaddressed problem by Apple) - today she lost about 4 hours of emails - all going out with the normal "whoosh" and not showing in an "outbox" as problematic sends - and then later discovered that there was no record not in the sent folder for her four hours of work and not received by multiple recipients. First time this has happened in 20+ years of using Apple. The value of her lost work this morning is far more than the value of the new computer. Her brother - a senior Apple programing engineer is clueless to explain where the emails went, why they weren't recorded anywhere - server gmail or otherwise - unless they were lost by Google (not seeing any announcements on the Net regarding a cloud/Google error.

Even though wife and brother are the proverbial Apple "fan boys," local Apple computer popularity has taken a severe sit back on the home front. If you have any suggestion as to where the lost "sent" emails (10+) that were sent, not recorded and not received are residing in a retrivable form - please don't hold back.

Thanks,

d

THANK YOU!

This is my problem exactly and no one at Apple would believe me or undestand what happened.

My old office was set up with PC's and Microsoft Outlook for the email program before I made the jump to Apple in 2008.

This email issue, and having lost imortant business emails without a trace, has forced me to make the jump back to Outlook as there seems to be blantant ignorance or blindness to this issue.

A.

I have been away from the keyboard for a bit, although reading from an iOS device.

Are there more than one Gmail account on her Mac? If so, has the SMTP been exclusively Authenticated for each account with the Username of that account? If not, messages may not go to the correct (or any) Sent folder -- would not be peculiar to Mail, but any email client.

At the bottom of the Sidebar to the Mail window, are there any other Sent folders listed for each account, particularly the Gmail one?

Ernie

Ernie,

Thanks for your thoughts. I think between all of us we have pretty much covered the bases on erroneous local placement of her emails. The new MBP worked fine (about two weeks) with regard to sending and receiving emails up to 8AM yesterday and all the emails produced between 8AM and 12 Noon were missing (and worked fine after this period) in the sent folder of the one and only gmail mailbox (IMAP), the emails were from all sent files, from all email archive files including trash and junk, could not be found on the computer with subject line searches (in case of dating error), were not on the gmail server, and not showing on IMAP. Since I was one recipient my wife became concerned after about half an hour just before noon when I didn't receive her email from her office a few feet away.

Her brother the Apple senior programing engineer theory is that when the emails were sent they were lost by gmail probably in an incompetent maintenance process and therefore IMAP never received the necessary responses back from gmail to put them in the sent folder on my wifes computer. I found this in Wikipedia under "IMAP Disadvantages" makes this description "Unlike some proprietary protocols which combine sending and retrieval operations, sending a message and saving a copy in a server-side folder with a base-level IMAP client requires transmitting the message content twice, once to SMTP for delivery and a second time to IMAP to store in a sent mail folder." Sounds like neither recipent of sent folder responses from gmail happened as neither recipent nor sent folder received the IMAP messages. I don't pretend to be sophisticated enough to understand all of this, but it appears that you may be correct that in this case Apple Mail may not be at fault - unless there is an Apple Mail related problem enabling the IMAP process errors and loss at the server. However, since the computer and Apple Mail had been working fine up to this point it sounds like an external problem or some combination requiring internal and external errors.

Since I have never lost emails on my gmail POP accounts, I converted my one IMAP gmail account to POP hoping to avoid what appears to a random endemic problem related to IMAP and possibly cloud management problems. I still think Apple Mail ***** as piece of well maintained and competent email software and I only use it because of it's one saving grace - one of if not the only competent image scaling tools in email software.

We would still like to recover my wifes email compositions from yesterday so she doesn't have start over on them and their research from scratch - but I'm guessing unless gmail figures out something wasn't working right between 8 and 12 am yesterday and has an ability to send the second IMAP message to her sent box as it should have to begin with - we'll never find those emails.

Have you checked Mail, if you got some Rules there? I deleted all my Rules and haven't lost an email since.

I was switching some domains from GoDaddy to another hosting site (finally!) and I saw the transfer authorization email appear in Notifications. It was going to my ".me" account. "Great!" I say, "I'll do the transfer now."

So I go to Mail to check open the email. No email. Not in spam, not in trash, not on iCloud the broswer version. Vanished :::poof!::: into a puff of logic (I assume).

Kept happening multiple times until I changed the email address of the "Administrator" in GoDaddy to one of my gmail accounts, and it went through no problem. Showed up in Notifications and then WAS THERE in Mail!

I still get the dreaded disappearing emails headed for my ".me" account every day. Most of the time, I'm not by my desktop or laptop and don't see a mail "Notification" coming in, so I have no clue how many emails I'm actually missing.

Yes, I mix my ".me" account and its multiple aliases with "gmail" accounts in Mail, but I never had a problem (that I know of) until a week or two ago. Didn't change passwords, didn't go over my iCloud limit, didn't add a new device to the account. And it's hard to tell, but I think it's just my ".me" accounts that are the problem.

There are multiple complaints about this specific "feature" on various online threads, but no cure.

Aggravating we can't get a straight answer from Apple.

[Running Snow Lion 10.8.3 and Mail 6.3]

I recently started having a problem with my Google Apps mail account.

I had noticed that mail had not been coming through, or so I thought. I predominantly use Apple's mail.app on both my computer/iPhone, and rarely use the web app and as a result never really archived email and had everything just sitting in my inbox. I had recently started using the new "Mailbox" app that's causing all the rage and upon doing noticed the odd behaviour.

What alerted me to the problem was noticing some push notifications from Mailbox and then later going in to read the messages and not finding them. By pulling up the web interface I could search and discovered these emails were ending up in "All Mail", unread, without me ever intervening.

I subsequently removed the account from Mailbox. Problem persisted. Revoked access from mailbox. Problem persisted. Checked my filters - I had none. Problem persisted.

I have a feeling it's related SOMEHOW to Mailbox and it's behaviours. The odd part is I also enabled Mailbox with my other @gmail.com account and had no problems to speak of.

I've been doing some digging online and it looks like everyone is saying it's related to bad filters, but I have none.

I haven't the faintest idea what could be causing it but it's rather problematic. Some emails are newsletters, and aren't that pressing. Others are emails from co-workers and employers and having them go un-noticed for days on end is not acceptable.

I've now changed my password, turned off IMAP and re-enabled, and even removed/re-added my account to both my Mac and my iPhone. I'm hoping this will solve the problem but wanted to get some input in case it doesn't.

Of course everyone over at the google boards are saying it's an apple problem, likely related to the unified inbox of the iphone. I call hooey, since I've had the unified inbox on my iPhone 4 since introduced without issue, and my new iPhone 5 that I got in september and only last week did the problem start showing up.

I have a feeling it's related to something Mailbox did when they enabled filters or something but I don't know. After removing from my phone things seemed to be okay and I've now added it back to my phone to see if it happens again. If it is my phone I'm completely at a loss...