I sometimes get the sound of outgoing mail when nothing was sent.

I add another vote, hoping a large number of posts will get Apple's attention one day. Happened to me few times in the past, and now today with MacBook Air 2011 and 10.8.5. I plugged in the headphones which changed the volume level, and started hearing the whoosh sounds, about one per second, and less frequent incoming message boings. Before that, my volume was at zero whole week, so who knows how long that has been going on. No evidence of sent mail in the mailbox, nothing strange in system.log, and it stopped when I quit Mail and relaunched it. Very disturbing...

For those who are scratching their heads and not heard the sound, I was able to hit record yesterday when the occurrence started. It's here: http://review.truenorthinc.com/public/_dingswoosh/DingSwoosh.mp4

In this latest instance, all I did was wake up my Powerbook.

This just happened to me for the first time today. I opened my 2013 13" MBP running 10.8.4 and plugged in an external display. I've been having problems with Mail taking a while to let me use it (maybe I need to archive or rebuild mailboxes?), but once it was free to let me use it, I started hearing the whooshes and beeps. No evidence in the sent email boxes that any email was actually sent.

Strange.

Just happened to me for the first time. I frantically forced-quit mail, worrying that I was sending dozens of emails to unknown parties. But I saw nothing in the sent mail box.

It is happening to me too. Macbook Pro 2010 running OSX 10.8.5. It seemed to start happening after I got a weird pop up two weeks ago with a lot of arabic characters, but maybe just a coincidence. took to genius bar, they can't find anything wrong with computer.

This did not begin for me until I switched to a MacAir last year. I am running 10.8.5. It seems to happen when I inadvertently open iTunes - and yesterday, my first time in iTunes after I upgraded to Maverick, there were so many rapid swooshes that I desperately tried to record the sounds but failed. All this makes me wonder if it has to do with updates to apps.

So, since I've upgraded to Mavericks, I haven't had this problem occur a single time in the last few weeks. It used to happen intermittently before, so since I don't have a reliable, repeatable way to cause the problem, I can't be completely confident that the problem is gone, but I take it as a good sign since it used to happen pretty frequently, and hasn't happened a single time lately.

How come this thread suddenly ended after so much activity? I am on a MacBook Pro, 10.8.5, and have this problem constantly. Has anyone figured it out?

The thread probably ended because nobody found a solution and Apple hasn't stepped in?

This is still happening to me, and I can trigger it when I plug my headphones into my computer.

I still saw this problem with Mavericks - but the 10.9.1 release updated the mail client and I have NOT had it happen since updating to 10.9.1. Perhaps it is cured? Dare I say it?

I can confirm that it has completely stopped happening for me, and it stopped with Mavericks. I'm on a Macbook Pro Retina (the first version) and this was happening to me incessantly. Since switching to Mavericks I am simply not plagued with this problem anymore.

I don't suppose the upgrade to Mavericks created any problems did it? I am always a little nervous about doing these upgrades. And did upgrading to Mavericks fix the delayed typing to character appearance that also happens when typing into an email message? Or would that be too much to ask!!

I can't comment on the delayed character typing because I never encountered that issue, but as far as Mavericks goes, I really like it. I haven't seen any issues with it at all.

Great, thanks. Maybe that will be my project tomorrow. Can't be any worse than it already is.

I haven't experienced this issue again in a year or so.

A propos the delayed typing, sounds like you have to repair your disk permissions and give it a restart after that.