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Serious Mail problems

After upgrading to Mavericks, the following has happened with my Mail app :

1. Lost a couple of important folders wtih all messages in them

2. Flagged messages all messed up (wrong counts, for example)

3. Mail headers are there but there is no content in a number of messages

4. "Sent" folder is all messed up, some messages appear, others do not

Is there an immediate fix, so I can recover my previous Mail set up or do we need to wait for Apple to fix this ?

Posted on Oct 24, 2013 12:00 AM

Reply
32 replies

Oct 24, 2013 12:44 AM in response to OVozeh

I have some similiar mail problems. For me I used my mailbox on my laptop as a pop3 mailbox. On my mobile phone i use imap. After I installed Mavericks all my mails in my Inbox were gone except the ones I put locally in different mailboxes. But a recovery from time machine helped me get back my lost mails. I hope you use TM there too.

Oct 24, 2013 7:10 AM in response to OVozeh

I had a similar problem with Mail that looks like reindexing Spotlight has cured. That might help here. See this article from the knowledgebase.


http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2409


The suggestion from another thread was to only process the ~Library/Mail folder, but in the end I chose to reindex the complete hard disk because when I first tried the steps described I ran into a Privacy List error that required additional remedial steps. See here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3587838?answerId=22754118022#22754118022

Oct 24, 2013 6:47 PM in response to OVozeh

I am also having similar problems. After upgrading mail. I am using imap and the mail is in other clients. Lost a lot of local setup adn items. 19 recent drafts were replaced with two from 2011. Things were restored from Time Machine. After a relaunch of mail, I am back to the strange Mail behaviour and lost drafts (not sure what else) after the Mavericks upgrade.


AsC.

Oct 28, 2013 7:03 AM in response to OVozeh

OVozeh wrote:


After upgrading to Mavericks, the following has happened with my Mail app :

1. Lost a couple of important folders wtih all messages in them

2. Flagged messages all messed up (wrong counts, for example)

3. Mail headers are there but there is no content in a number of messages

4. "Sent" folder is all messed up, some messages appear, others do not

Is there an immediate fix, so I can recover my previous Mail set up or do we need to wait for Apple to fix this ?

I had problems 1 and 3 above (possibly others but didn't notice this). I think I've fixed it by doing the following:


From the 'Go' menu > Go to folder > paste in '~/Library/Mail/V2'. This takes you to your mail folder. I had two versions of one of my mailboxes in the mail folder. The incomplete one had a '2' after it's name. The original (pre-Mavericks) mailbox was there with all of the right subfolders. So I dragged the incomplete folder to trash, deleted the '2' from the original folder name, quit and reopened mail, and everything seems ok.


I'm a bit of a novice so I offer no guarantees this won't cause other problems. But it's working for me at the moment.

Oct 28, 2013 7:24 AM in response to gjw1980

gjw1980 wrote:

I had problems 1 and 3 above (possibly others but didn't notice this). I think I've fixed it by doing the following:


From the 'Go' menu > Go to folder > paste in '~/Library/Mail/V2'. This takes you to your mail folder. I had two versions of one of my mailboxes in the mail folder. The incomplete one had a '2' after it's name. The original (pre-Mavericks) mailbox was there with all of the right subfolders. So I dragged the incomplete folder to trash, deleted the '2' from the original folder name, quit and reopened mail, and everything seems ok.


I'm a bit of a novice so I offer no guarantees this won't cause other problems. But it's working for me at the moment.


For me it helped to re-index the mail completely. That was quiet easy to do. First is to stop Mail.app completely. Then you go into terminal. As you are logged in as your user there you can directly go into the right folder, which is


~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData


If you look into the directory there is a couple of files called "Envelope Index" and "Envelope Index-wal" with maybe a lot of different version numbers behind. Best thing is to move away the current "Envelope Index" and "Envelope Index-wal" to a different location. Now you can start Mail.app again and it will inform you that it has to make a new index of your folder. Once this is finished all my mails were back in my application. Why? Because the update to Mavericks did not delete the mails it just messed up the indexes.

Oct 28, 2013 10:15 AM in response to toldor

I've done all of the above and my problems seem to be solved. Thank you, gjw1980 and toldor. It needs to be said that one needs to examine the mailboxes very carefully before deleting the correct ones. Also, I had to do the whole process twice to arrive at the satisfactory result. Let's just hope that it will keep !

Serious Mail problems

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