Can send but not receive mail

Hello David, Allen and Stripey,

I am also following along with all instructions and will report results or lack thereof as well so far I am deleting the rules.plist and no results. I am noticing an immediate 'replacement' of those items back into the folder as soon as you open mail.

David,
Yes thanks for leading us through this.

Here is the one you requested from my Mail folder as well.


DefaultCounts
Envelope Index
LSMMap2
Mailboxes
MessageRules.plist
MessageRules.plist.backup
OpenedAttachments.plist
POP-username@pop.3riversdbs.net
POP-username@pop.3rivers.net
POP-username@pop.3riversdbs.net
POP-username@gmail.com@pop.gmail.com
POP-username@postoffice10.mail.cornell.edu
Signatures
Signatures.plist
SmartMailboxes.plist








David Gimeno Gost


Posts: 2,890
From: Barcelona (Spain)
Registered: Jan 2, 2005
New! Re: Can send but not receive mail
Posted: Aug 4, 2006 9:43 AM in response to: stripey
Reply Email

You're welcome.

In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Mail/. With that folder open, do Edit > Select All (⌘A), then Edit > Copy (⌘C), and paste it in your reply to this post, to let me see the names of the files and folders present at the root level of the Mail folder.

Before actually posting that information, you may edit it so that the file/folder names do not reveal any details you wish to keep private, e.g. you may replace any real username with "username" if you wish; similarly, you may disguise any domain names you don't want to be revealed. Try to be consistent in how you disguise those details, though, as we may need to refer to them in subsequent posts.

Now, locate the account folders within ~/Library/Mail/ -- their name begins with the account type (POP, IMAP, .Mac), followed by the account username and the incoming mail server. For each account that has the problem, repeat the process to let me see the names of the files and folders it contains.

Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user's home folder.

iMac G5 17" (iSight) Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Ok My issues are now becoming more clearly distinct from those of stripey's.

All of my email accounts are functioning perfetly well EXCEPT the 3rd on from the top.

Content of that POP Folder is copied below:

Deleted Messages.mbox
Drafts.mbox
INBOX.mbox
Junk.mbox
Sent Messages.mbox


as this account is sending fine but not receiving I have taken the liberty of including the contents of the inbox as well.

content_index
content_index-(null)-1068
mbox
Messages (folder)
table ofcontents

FYI- I went through over 70 minutes of examination from the ISP perspective and then spoke to the satellite company for over 45 mintues. No one had any solutions. We jumped through several hoops.

I ended up calling my ISP and had tehm set up a new account ( I am allowed 5 with this ISP) and thus all accounts are sending and receiving fine except this one - which of course was my main one for the last 18 months or so.

I also cleared out (and deleted) numerous emails into adjacent folders to bring the overall numbers down in the INBOX.

So I am truly confused so far. I will now carry on with the next steps as wEll

Thanks David!


Tim

Well, that Entourage doesn't work either doesn't necessarily mean the problem is at server. Letting us know what the error message in Entourage is wouldn't hurt, though.

And it could be that Mail is also providing some sort of error information in one of the log files. You can check this as follows:

1. Open /Applications/Utilities/Console.

2. From the File menu, choose either Open Console Log, or Open System Log, or both, so that the Console application displays the contents of both system.log and console.log.

3. Try to reproduce the problem and look at the bottom of the Console windows for messages that might have been written there as a result.

The purpose of testing on a different user account is to determine whether the problem is system-wide or there is something amiss in the home folder. If system-wide, another thing to look at would be the method used to connect to Internet, and try with a different method if possible.

Well, it helps in the sense that there seems indeed to be a problem with the server. It doesn't help in the sense that I have no idea what to do about it.

It would still be useful to try connecting to the Internet using a different method. Is that possible? How are you connected to Internet?

Tim,

You have some obsolete files from previous versions of Mail in your INBOX.mbox folder (see Mac OS X 10.4 Mail: Some mailbox files used by Mac OS X 10.3 are not deleted after importing), but I don't see anything amiss there.

Does Mail display the same error error message in the Console in your case as it does for Stripey? Have you tried using Mail on a different user account?

And what did you mean when you said "I also cleared out (and deleted) numerous emails into adjacent folders to bring the overall numbers down in the INBOX"?

Hi,

I'm possibly having the same problem - please refer to this thread for more information regarding this:-

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=588951&tstart=0
("Phantom Blank Spam blocking Mail from retrieving new mail in Apple Mail")

The problem seems to revolve around blank email messages being received into a server-side inbox. These blank messages, presumably some form of spam have no sender, no recipient, no date, no source code, no body text and no subject.

These 'phantom' blank emails appear to be the root of the problem as once they are manually removed the our server-side inbox (either through Apple Mail's 'Get Info' / 'Remove from Server' (Server settings) function, or via the ISPs webmail facility), the email starts picking up mail automatically again–immediately, without any other intervention other than clicking 'Get Mail'. Until they are removed, Apple Mail will NOT collect any more mail, automatically or manually through 'Get Mail'.

Please check to see if you have any such messages. I'd be interested to know if this is a scenario dependent on 'phantom email' or ISP specific.

Best wishes
Jamie

The Account Directory field is always grayed out after setting up the account, is the same for all accounts, and has absolutely no bearing on this.