Mac mail will not load emails anymore, just keeps "Loading..."

Hi,

I have the same problem here. After Rebuild all my emails were gone. Some of them are still viewable in Finder, but do not show up in Mail.

I'm having the exact same problem today. I've seen this in the past and it went away, but it looks like it's stuck forever today... It's only happening on certain important emails however - not all - and mostly - if not ALL in my SENT folder.

I've repaired disk permissions, restarted and still the same.

The only thing out of the usual I did today was add another email account.

I have about 10000 email in my In boxes and under 2000 in my Sent.

Not that this will help but - Is there an easy way to copy all the emails into something readable outside of MAil - to "clean" the boxes?

Hi, try via Finder: ~/Library/mail. You can read your mail by using quick look.

The problem has just gotten much worse! My main domain email account can no longer "load" ANY messages in any boxes on that account and appears to now be gone.

I've gone to User/library/mail/V2 and can see all the other POP and IMAP accounts in there, but not my domain's.

I've also looked under root/library - and there is no Mail folder there at all.

I did receive what looked like a spam/virus email this morning -

"FedEx Shipment Notification, 44905453526" -

from Fedex supposedly but no known package shipment, or sender - I looked at the email but didn't click on any links.

Update - I can send and receive emails for my domain today - it's just that everything else is either gone - or maybe not - just stuck "loading"?

As far as this -

try via Finder: ~/Library/mail. You can read your mail by using quick look.

I cannot find what you're referring to and cannot read anything in the Mail folders I do find!

Just to make sure we're on the same page - this is OSX Lion 10.7.2 we're talking about. Mail 5.1

ANOTHER further update - as I wrote this, more of my emails from this domain came back - but the vast majority are still "loading".

Hi

I´ve almost the same problem. Since my last update mail can´t connect to the imap server. But I didn´t change anything. On my iphone mail works perfectly baut on my mac book pro not. (lion 10.7.2 mail 5.1)

Please help me, it´s making me mad...

Thanks Sabine

I had the same. Posts older than 1 day keep saying: "loading..."

I did "Mailbox -> Rebuild" and all mail was GONE.

I didn't have TimeMachine configured.

In my case, it was a certificate that was the problem. Apparently Apple Mail started to check if there's a certificate on the original mail domain. And there is, but it's a self-signed certificate, which Apple mail thought could not be trusted. Why it then needs to mess up my entire mail box as a reward and not give a sensible report telling what to do to fix this... very un-Apple! Steve get out of your grave now and do your Evil Steve thing!

I did the following to at least get the mails of the last month back:

1. Look up all mail settings (especially POP/SMTP password
2. Open preferences, select the bad mailbox, tab "advanced"
3. Disable the account
4. Change the pop account user name into some random curse word (or else it will block in step 6)
5. It asks to Save Changes, say yes
6. Make a new account with all the same settings as the old one
7. Now it downloads all mails that were not deleted from the server... in my case the last 30 days.

But now I'm still missing a lot.

Thank you so much for the above solution. I have been traveling with this new macbook pro and my Lenovo. It's been a royal pain. I didn't lose anything except four hours an d two days of going back and forth between PC and Mac trying to fix this. I think Macbooks are not ready for a Windows infested corporate world. Oh I had to give up on outlook on Mac because everytime I opened Outlook, it would start re-writing my corporate exchange server and then my blackberry (yes, I can't do anything useful on an I-phone sorry) would be full of over 5000 email messages from three years ago. Yes, so far I have not been impressed with mac 😟 Although, I love my iPad and IMac at home for non-work related stuff.

THANK YOU, BAS GOOT!

spectacular solutoin Bas Groot, thanks! will try it ... dunno how you guessed that

Hey Apple Support, PLEASE post a fix or solution for this so people can recover their lost E-Mails. Almost all my Mails from years ago. That I still need. They contain very valubale informations for me.

I can still open them in Finder but not in Mac Mail on Lion. And honestly I have to say LION *****! Its like Vista for Mac. No even worse. I did not loose any mail on Outlook at all. This is not what I expected a Apple MacBook Pro to be.

It is a real shame that we have to deal with this issue!

Thank you Bas Groot! You really helped us out. Any idea why this happenes? It is a big problem...

I just discovered I was a life saver, thanks for the kudos everyone.🙂

Why? It's not your fault. It's because how Apple Mail stores mail, it simply is not robust enough.

A robust program assumes that it may crash at any moment while writing to any of its files, and that there will be undiscovered, rarely occurring bugs that will have similar effect. The damage it does needs to be detected later and then repaired automatically or degraded gracefully so only one mail is lost, and not all of them.

Evidently, Apple fails to do so or didn't do a thorough job.

For mail this is really urgent, because a mail program does many things simultaneously which increases the chance that things go wrong once in a while, and on top email comes from the wild world outside and can contain many types of junk that need to be contained. Mail server delivery data muck, deliberate attempts to hack your mailbox by mail, phishing attempts, html newsletters made by Neanderthalers or marketeers, other buggy mail programs, poorly made phising mails, regular spam, you name it.

So there are a lot of possible 'runaway cars' that may dent another in the parking lot, but this should never cause an entire parking lot building to tilt so all the cars roll to one side of the floor and while still there, can't open the doors anymore.

Computer science made many solutions for this the past 3 decades and it isn't even that hard to do, many file formats have auto-recovery features.

For example: You may have seen a movie on TV or internet, or skype conversation that goes into "weird blocks" a few seconds and then go back to normal. That's damaged data and auto-recovery of the data format kicking in to fix it or at least reduce the damage. Without it, you'd be looking at digital snow for the rest of the show. Apple does the latter to your mail.

In modern databases this is done all the time, because a company can't afford to lose all of its financial data because 1 record went bad or there once was a power outage. For a user, losing his/her mail can be just as catastrophic. If they can, Apple can. Come on.

But that answer won't help ya, unless someone at Apple actually READS these threads and feels intense SHAME that they did not listen to that inner voice saying: hmm it looks spiffy now but we really gotta work on the internals a bit more. No, data is not sexy. Yes, it's boring. But it's necessary. Remember Steve's step father taught his son that the backside of a drawer should also be made neatly. Dad was right folks.

Since this mail I'm going into my 3rd combat with Mocrosoft Exchange which is another factor that, while it should be better than regular mail, also is another rogue runaway car that dents the fragile internal file structure of Apple Mail.

Yours truly, an Apple fanboy.

have you found out how to recover old emails?