Mail shows 1 UNREAD Message But there isn't one Anywhere

Instead of deleting the accounts and recreating them, I found it much easier (and what worked for me) was to go into Mail>Preferences>Accounts and then disable each account one by one until you found the offending account. After that I just re-enabled my accounts again and the problem was solved. For what its worth in my case it was an IMAP account that had to be disabled and re-enabled. This, in my opion, seems faster than deleting and recreating accounts.

Cheers!

Create a new Smart Mailbox under Mail > Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox... > define a rule for new messages.

Now click on your new smart mailbox "New Messages" and you should see the one unread message.

Regards,

Captfred

I was able to get rid of this happening in a Smart Mailbox with 1 unread message in one or more Smart Mailboxes. I have not found the source of the problem nor a solution but was able to get rid of the "1" unread message displaying next to the Smart Mailbox.

Right-click the Smart Mailbox and click Duplicate Smart Mailbox. This will remove the "1" from ALL the Smart Mailboxes having this problem. Then, delete the duplicate you just created to clean-up. Just a couple of clicks to get rid of the annoying problem.

Here is my configuration:

MAC OSX 10.7.2

Mail 5.1

Accounts: Some POP and Google POP

Hope this helps.

Your solution to remove the "ghost unread message" worked after I disabled all my accounts and also after I restarted Mail - because after disabling all the accounts the problem was still there. When I started enabling my accounts one-by-one, the "ghost message" did not reappear. Ghost msg was gone but probably only for now. I do not have any IMAP account and also did not find the offending account. But, I like your solution better than my previous posting which I can no longer recreate.

Thanks.

I'm able to duplicate this problem by opening Mail, clicking inbox and just doing a paste. (command + v)

I ust have done this accidently and created 'ghost unread messages' but I'm not able to resolve the provlem by disabling or trying the smart mailbox options.

This happens often with imap accounts like gmail.

You have a combined inbox on the top in the sidebar in Mail.

As soon as yo have read the mail, it will not be in the unread list there.

But lower down you will also have the same imap folder where this particular unread email is still listed as unread.

It will solve itself as soon as the mail account has synchronised ( set "check for new messages" to a short time) again. When there is a high server load this sync comes even later.

I've had this happen go me a couple times and it has been a message in the Trash. Click the Trash and see if that is where it is.

This worked perfectly for me.