"retrieving mail" wheel won't stop spinning

I'm having the same issue, even with all the latest Tiger updates.

I had this recently too. The fix seemed to be as follows:

I logged into my .Mac account online (click on .Mac above, log in and click on Mail). There was a message in my Inbox which had not been delivered to my desktop Mail.app. As it happens, it was spam, so I just deleted it, and Mail.app immediately stopped endlessly trying to retrieve mail.

Perhaps the fact that it was spam caused the problem, but if I'd wanted to receive it, I imagine I could have forwarded it to another address and then deleted it, with the same result.

Were there any emails that you hadn't received on your desktop?

Sorry I wasn't clear - yes, that was what I meant ... because what seemed to be the cause of my Mail.app forever 'retrieving' was that there an email in my Webmail Inbox, which wasn't getting through to my Mail.app Inbox.

Hi,
I'm having a similar problem, but with my Earthlink account, not my .Mac account. The wheel spins perpetually on my Earthlink account when I try to retrieve. I now have 4 days of mail on my server that I can't download! Doesn't help to trash the preferences.

any ideas?

thanks

I'm having similar problems. In addition, when I click on a new message, it doesn't switch to being shown as "Read", i.e. it still is in bold and still has the blue ball next to it.

I had to force-quit, then go back in the program.

I, too, had blank views when I click on a mailbox, whether an inbox, or a folder, or the trash, whatever.

All this started after I performed the software update to 10.4.5

I had the non stop spinning wheel this week too - never had it before. It happened on the graphite iMac I use at work with 10.4.4. Both this iMac and my eMac here at home are connected to same ISP except that the one at work has DSL where home is a slow dial up.

I called my ISP's 24/7 tech support. It took 4 calls to them with mega frustration on my part in between because some of the techs are obviously anti Mac. But suddenly it magically started working. I didn't do anything at my end and they never admit they do anything at their end. They always assume the problem is with the customer when 99% of the time it's really their problem.
I downloaded 10.4.5 here at home on my eMac this morning. So far, it's going fine.
Is the problem really with the Mac or is it the ISP? Like I said, it suddenly started working again while talking to the tech guys and I had not changed anything at home.
What do you do when an obviously biased to Windows tech won't help? I've been left just hanging when the tech didn't know the answer. Both times I called back additional times and got another tech that was willing to dig and correct the problem.

Oh yeah, this anti Mac tech yesterday says, sneeringly "We've had a lot of trouble with Mac Mail". Does the term Mac Mail mean the mail within .Mac that you pay a fee for? I don't have that. What do I tell a tech when he asks what mail program I use. It's whatever comes with Macs when you buy a new Mac. I haven't bought anything special or additional.

Rose


eMac Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Add my name to the lengthening list of people who have a never ending download clock or wheel of death.
I thought I noticed that two computers on the same .Mac account would be the trouble, since I get a wee bit better performance when I shut one down and wait a few minutes.

* Guy

Yup, same thing here. My .mac account works fine, but my pop accounts often get the never ending activity spinner. Right now Mail has downloaded 70 of 89 emails in one of pop account and is stuck there, and has been stuck there for about an hour.

It seems like Mail forgets about some messages too, I've had to trash my prefs and setup the accounts again a few times only to find hundreds of new emails coming in from months ago!

The only way I can get out of the never ending spinner is to force quit mail and start it up again a few times until it either gives up or tells me there are no more mails to download.

Well, i fixed my spinning wheel problem... still don't know what was wrong...
Following instructions in a post in this forum, I moved all the mailboxes for my bad account to another folder and removed the pref. Then I recreated the account and - VOILA! - problem fixed... mail downloads normally and wheel acts normally too.

Hope this might help others - but I'd still like to understand what went wrong!
m