E-mail disappears after receiving

Question

Level 3

733 points

E-mail disappears after receiving

I'm seeing a strange behavior on our Snow leopard seever.

At least one of our IMAP e-mail accounts has difficulty receiving mail from a few, specific senders. I will see an e-mail arrive (the Mac mail client software has the "1" appear in the inbox momentarily) but before it can be read it simply disappears. It's not in the trash or any other folder, and in checking the dovecot mail folders, it's not there either. But there are records in the mail log that support the fact the mail was delivered.

We do use a few mail rules for that account, but none of them would be applicable to cause the mail to disappear. Oddly enough, the two issues I have seen so far are from automatic mailings when passwords are needing to be reset (but two different companies).

Any suggestions on what might be happening or where to look?

Xserve, Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Dec 13, 2012 1:02 PM

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Answer 1

iToaster

Level 3

739 points

Dec 13, 2012 2:54 PM in response to Kevlar

if you setup the same email account on a test machine and disble the email account on the orignal machine

do you see the same behavior

or can you access he email account via webmail

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Answer 2

UptimeJeff

Level 4

3,479 points

Dec 20, 2012 7:03 PM in response to Kevlar

Sounds like a mail client is setup with junk filtering enabled.

It moved the message out of the inbox, probably to a local Junk folder.

Maybe their machine at home..???

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Answer 3

Dec 22, 2012 9:33 PM in response to UptimeJeff

Or perhaps another mail client configured as POP that is frequently checking the mailbox and removing any messages it finds?

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Answer 4

Jan 20, 2013 5:24 PM in response to UptimeJeff

For the benefit of anyone googling this behaviour, I can confirm what happened to me today, which is a bit like what UptimeJeff and Fred Turner describe.

1. I received an email into my iCloud account (on my macbok pro). Mountain Lion's Notifications flashed up the fact of its existence for a split second, so I knew the email was real.

2. It did not materialise in my inbox! This was odd. It was not in the junk folder either!!

3. I started googling and thinking about options such as rebuilding the mailbox and even deleting the Envelope index. (I had recently done the latter to fix the useless search results I was getting in Mail.app - I also re-spotlighted everything too...)

3. Anyway, by reading other people's ideas, I had one. I went to my other mac, a desktop mac mini, and checked for the message in the junk folder there. And sure enough, that's where it was. This is because I needed to fix a setting, as follows.

MAIL --> PREFS --> ACCOUNTS --> iCLOUD --> Mailbox behaviours --> tick "store junk messages on server".

(I fixed this on the mac mini, but I perhaps had it unticked on both Macs, as perhaps the settings are sync'd via iCloud anyway? It is ticked on my laptop as I write this.)

To explain: the message was coming in, and the Mac Mini was treating it as junk, moving it to its junk folder, then deleting the server copy. It wasn't appearing in my junk folder on my laptop, because, by definition, it was in a junk folder on the hard drive (not the server) of my mac mini only.

I hope that helps people. When in doubt, check all your macs and devices for this setting.

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