Unread message count is wrong in Mail and Dock

I have a MacBook Pro running 10.7.5. I tried methods mentioned here with no luck on my office 365 exchange account in Mac Mail. Was showing 5 unread in junk and 17 unread in the inbox. I resolved by disabling the account in Mail preferences. Closed and saved preferences. Enabled the account in Mail preferences. Closed and saved preferences. Unread messages count cleared. Hope this helps.

*** Sorry, No happiness here! Unread message count is back when after I Quit and Opened Mac Mail ***

Same problem here guys....I don't even have a "Mail" folder in my library....what's up with that?

That sorted me , thanks. Alice

Thank you - worked for my issue with the wrong email "unread" count on my work exchange based email.

Thx for the fix. It was driving me nuts. It's also interesting that it continues to pop up 1 year after your original post. Thx again!

Hi guys,

Sorry to be a nudnick but I cannot actuate this fix because I do not see a Mail folder in my Library. Can anybody give me advice on that? I would love to make the fix, because I still show a phantom "1" message unread in one of my ten mail accounts....but don't have the Mail folder visible in my Library to work with....any suggestions?

thanks so much

scott

It's in your user library wihich is hidden.

To access:

http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/global/access-hidden-user-library-files.html

Finder > Go Menu, hold down the option key and you will see "Library" open that and you will see a "Mail" folder

or try selecting all messages in that mail folder and mark all as read

or makr tghem all as unread and then close mail, reopen it and select them all again and mark them *** as read

Worked for me too.

I trashed the "Envelope Index" file and Mail reindexed itself. I had more than 100K emails, and it took about 5 minutes. Some frightening messages popped up but it finally worked.

Thanks for the solution.

Fred

Hi everybody...well, I've tried every one of these suggestions and still no luck. Anybody got another idea? Here's what I've done:

1. Deleted all "Envelope Index" file in Library/Mail/V2/Maildata folder and re-launched Mail and allowed it to re-populate....done this several times, including re-starting the machine

2. Disabled the account, quit mail, re-started Mail, re-enabled the account

3. Said a few choice words over it, begging it to stop its errant behavior

4. Mark as unread, close mail, re-open mail, Mark as read

I'm stumped. The offending account is a gmail account, but I have a few other gmail accounts that are not doing this. Is there perhaps anything I can do in the actual gmail account online that would help it?

Anybody got any more ideas? I have a 15" MBP retina running OSX 10.8.3 and Apple Mail 6.3.

Thanks and have a great day,

Scott

Absolutely! I finally had enough when, after seeing 2 phantom new Exchange emails that weren't, I now had 7 new Exchange junk mails that weren't. This worked. I was a little worried, reopening Mail that responded like it was new and then had to wait for 99K + emails to import and then had to quit and restart...but all is 100% fixed. Thanks Glenn and HACKINTOSH!!!

I have a different approach to reset the counting without rebuilding the index.

DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK

The Envelop Index is actually a sqlite database, the counting is being placed in "mailboxes" table;

For example ,when the counting shows "2" when you really read all of them...

enter the following command in terminal:

cd ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData

sqlite3 Envelope\ Index

select ROWID from mailboxes where unread_count_adjusted_for_duplicates = 2;

this command should return result like this:

ROWID

17

Set the counting of this ROWID to 0...

update mailboxes set unread_count_adjusted_for_duplicates = 0 where ROWID = 17;

Done!

On my iMac, this is absolutely the only thing that has worked. I had phantom counted emails in both the inbox and trash; the program needed to be run twice as the counts were different in each box. Quite wonderful.

Thank you. That helped.

Not sure this is pertinent... but I had a similar problem. Deleting the 'envelope' files didn't work, de-activating the (IMAP) account only worked for 10 seconds, restarting my 2 month old MacBook Air not at all helpful, etc.

I had 7 invisible inbox unreads for several days, which suddenly today ballooned to 210!

Turned out that the culprit was a particular email thread ("the Gadgeteer"). I get a post from them once or twice a week, about new tech products. Not sure how this happened (since I do indeed read them), but deleting this thread of consecutive emails (which were all bunched in one long 'conversation', as Mail 6.5 calls it), from this site solved my problem. All 210 gone. Never had this issue with older versions of Mail, and I've subscribed to this site for a couple of years... well, whoever said 10.6 was less buggy may be right.