mail activity counter

+1 Same annoying problem. The activity counter though seems to operate randomly. Somtimes when I send a one message the counter says 2 sometimes 5 and incoming is any one's guess 10 or a 100. What's apple up to??

Mail activity is no longer appears as a button of the mail sidebar , you only see mail activity when you are sending an email at the same place as where mail activity button used to be.

From Mail (Mountain Lion): Rebuild mailboxes:

"You might need to rebuild a mailbox to update the list of messages in the mailbox. For example, if messages appear to be missing or garbled, or if you can’t find all relevant messages when you search using Entire Message. Rebuilding a mailbox can take a while depending on how many messages are in the mailbox.

Select a mailbox, and then choose Mailbox > Rebuild.

When you rebuild mailboxes for Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Exchange accounts, locally stored messages and attachments are discarded, and the messages and attachments are downloaded again from the server to your Mac. Your mailbox appears empty until the download is complete."

I don't really believe this would help. Wouldn't hurt either but seems no use to me. Why take drastic measures for something that is basically an annoying bug but nothing significant. The counter will reset when you restart mail. So stay calm and wait for an update from Apple.

I've been rebuilding my mailboxes till the cows come home in a fgailed attempt to fix something else but it has certainly not fixed this problem. I have been having this problem certainly with Mountain Lion and now with Mavericks. I only use my POP account for sending mail so it cannot be an IMAP problem (unless mail is sending mails across all servers for some wierd reason) and the number of mails it sends ranges between one and seven so it is not a consistent rule that is being applied either.

I am staying cal;m and I have waited two years for an update from Apple - none of the many updates I have received has touched this.

Very odd. At least I'm not the only one - although perhaps we all have the same virus??? Eek!

I reboot very rarely, but in the last week a lot due to a format and clean install of Mavericks. Still no improvement to mail - but Mavericks goes like a rocket now, much better than my original upgrade install.

I have the same thing here, andit is VERY annoying.

Now the number has been 28. It is often in the low twenties. The trend is definitely crawling upwards. Come on Apple, this is a bug. Admit it and fix it. Otherwise we will start to wonder who has shimmed our outboxes and is receiving copies of all our mail. The NSA? Or GCHQ perchance? Is there a giant security hole in Mail that allows this to occur? It's time to address this now.

Yesterday (20 Dec 2013) I upgraded from Mountain Lion to Mavericks and am also finding that the Mail Activity Counter is reading inaccuratley ( at least I hope it is). I download emails and it will show "7 of 7" but I only get one (1) in my Inbox. I have been concerned that many of my incoming emails may have gone missing, but after reading of similar issues above, it would appear that there is a bug in Mail. Also, the count when sending an email is inaccurate and reads high. I hope Apple can get on to this and release a fix soon.

In my experience this problem started with Mavericks and hasn't been fixed with the update 10.9.1. Mail seems to be reporting a cumulative count rather than a count for the current activity. Send your first mesage and it reports sending one. Send another message and it reports sending two, and so on.

Closing and restarting Mail does not seem to reset the count. But it does reset, in my experience, if you restart your computer.

Yet another frustrating example of the many Mail bugs introduced with Mavericks. Aptly named, it would seem!

I had a similar problem with Apple Mail some years ago. The problem was happening in an IMAP account.

Junk mail messages were appearing in my In Box, but they didn't have valid header information and mail wasn't displaying them, but it was bumping up the count. When I used my ISP's web mail client I could see the messages and delete them. Once I'd deleted them using the web mail client, Mail's counter reset to zero.

Yes, I'm having the same problem. My Mail Activity will say its receiving 200+ messages, and only 2 will come in. And it takes FOREVER for this happen. All my email accounts are IMAP and I just ran the "rebuild" on all of them. Will see if that makes any difference.

My iMac is brand new - Apple had to replace my last iMac because it had to be brought in for service so many times. My new iMac has a Fusion Drive and 16GB of RAM. Yet when I wake it up from being asleep, Mail takes FOREVER to sync - even when I use the menu to tell it to sync. I thought maybe it was my internet connection, but while Mail is stuck, I can navigate the web in Firefox, so that can't be it.

I'm up to date on my OS and everything, so I don't know what's behind all these problems...

I have recently upgraded to Maverick, and the problem has not exactly gone away, although it is now only telling me that I've received hundreds of emails instead of thousands.

Plus I am having other mailbox problems. I have several signatures for various situations, but now, when I click on an alternate signature, instead of replacing the original genral signature, it places a second signature--the alternate--underneath the original, so that I have to go back and delete that..

And I have yet to reach an Apple site/service/employee who can/will attempt a solution. Maybe I should call the for a meeting with a genius. . .

I have the same problem as many other users. The displayed number of Incoming Messages shows anywhere between 1 and 100 or so but the actual received/downloaded messages can be between 0 and 10 or 20. Obviously I am not receiving a lot of messages on my iMac because I can get them on my iPad 2 or using my ISP webmail, messages show up there which never appear in my Mail.app on the iMac. But answering mail on my iPad is often inconvenient if I have to refer to previous data held on the iMac.

The 'missing' messages are nowhere on Mail.app on the iMac. Not in Archive, not in Junk.

I do not have IMAP or GMAIL accounts; just two standard POP acoounts with the one ISP. The ISP server has no problems because of the webmail and iPad mail as mentioned above.

I have tried the latest 'cure' of taking accounts off line then back on but to no avail. Quit Mail and relaunch has no fix. 10.9.1 no fix.

What to do? Wait for 10.9.2? I am so far reluctant to use third party mail apps as I always want to use Apple's inbuilt apps where possible. But this hassle is really tiring.

Yes, I have sent feedback. And rebuilt Mailboxes.

Peter Sealy1 wrote:

Obviously I am not receiving a lot of messages ...

The 'missing' messages are nowhere on Mail.app on the iMac. Not in Archive, not in Junk.

In my experience, and as per the original post, what's happening is Mail is using a cumulative count of all the messages sent and received. If you receive 20 messages during the day, and then message 21 arrives, the activity counter says 'receiving 21 of 21'. Same applies to messages you send.

You can reset the counter by restarting your computer.

This is not the way it used to be pre Mavericks and, in my view, not the way it should be. I too have reported it to Apple, along with various other persistent Mail bugs.

I don't really have any confidence that 10.9.2 will help. 10.9.1 sure didn't.