mail invisible after mavericks update

Quit Mail. Force quit if necessary.

Back up all data. That means you know you can restore the Mail database, no matter what happens.

Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:

~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData

Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. In the Finder, select

Go ▹ Go to Folder

from the menu bar. Paste into the box that opens (command-V), then press return.

A folder window will open. Inside it there should be files with names as follows:

• Envelope Index
• ExternalUpdates.storedata

Move those files to the Desktop, leaving the window open. Other files in the folder may have longer names that begin as above. Move those files, if any, to the Trash.

Log out and log back in. Relaunch Mail. It should prompt you to re-import your messages. You may get a warning that the index is damaged and that Mail has to quit. Click OK. Typically, the process takes a few minutes, but it may take hours if you have gigantic mailboxes. In that case, you may be able to speed things up by temporarily adding your home folder to the Privacy list in the Spotlight preference pane. Remove it when Mail has finished importing.

Test. If Mail now works as expected, you can delete the files you moved to the Desktop. Otherwise, post your results.

In the Mail Preferences/Accounts, make sure that SSL has NOT been checked.

Ernie

Although I have entered my name as the user, the home folder is still called "macintoshcustomer".

If you mean that's the name of your home folder in the Finder, and it's different from your login name, then it sounds like someone else installed the system and botched the job very badly. It's the sort of thing that the "Geek Squad" at a Best Buy would do. Is that what happened?

Problems such as yours are sometimes caused by files that should belong to you but are locked or have wrong permissions. This procedure will check for such files. It makes no changes and therefore is not, in itself, a solution.

First, empty the Trash, if possible.

Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C:

find ~ $TMPDIR.. \( -flags +sappnd,schg,uappnd,uchg -o ! -user $UID -o ! -perm -600 \) 2>&- | wc -l | pbcopy

Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.

Paste into the Terminal window (command-V). The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear.

The output of the command will be a number. It's automatically copied to the Clipboard. Please paste it into a reply.

Please enter "sh" in the Terminal window and press return. Then try again.

Some of your user files (not system files) have incorrect permissions or are locked. This procedure will unlock all your user files, reset their ownership, and remove their access-control lists. If you've set special values for those attributes, they will be reverted. In that case, either stop here, or be prepared to recreate the settings if necessary. Do so only after verifying that those settings didn't cause the problem. If none of this is meaningful to you, you don't need to worry about it.

Back up all data.

Step 1

If you have more than one user, and the one in question is not an administrator, then go to Step 2.

Enter the following command in the Terminal window in the same way as before (triple-click, copy, and paste):

{ sudo chflags -R nouchg,nouappnd ~ $TMPDIR..; sudo chown -R $UID:staff ~ $_; sudo chmod -R u+rwX ~ $_; chmod -R -N ~ $_; } 2>&-

This time you'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.

The command may take several minutes to run, depending on how many files you have. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear, then quit Terminal.

Step 2 (optional)

Take this step only if you have trouble with Step 1, if you prefer not to take it, or if it doesn't solve the problem.

Boot into Recovery. When the OS X Utilities screen appears, select

Utilities ▹ Terminal

from the menu bar. A Terminal window will open. In that window, type this:

res

Press the tab key. The partial command you typed will automatically be completed to this:

resetpassword

Press return. A Reset Password window will open. You’re not going to reset a password.

Select your startup volume ("Macintosh HD," unless you gave it a different name) if not already selected.

Select your username from the menu labeled Select the user account if not already selected.

Under Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs, click the Reset button.

Select

 ▹ Restart

from the menu bar.

This thread got off into more than what you initially observed (at least as reported.) When I migrated all my Mail files to also be on my new Mac Pro, I found that opening Mail would not show anything, and a few other odd things when I could get anything at all to show up. This despite being able to see that all files had in fact been migrated, and could be seen on the new computer.

I researched and found an amazlingly simple solution.

Deleting ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Container.plist was the simple trick.

Once upon a time, a classic remedy for many Mail ills was to purge the com.apple.mail.plist file, but in the newer framework of Mail in 10.8, and later, files in the Containers folder may now be the path?

Now I know you issue occurred when updating to Mavericks on the same computer, and not a migration, but you intially reported systems were exactly like what I experienced.

Ernie

Step 2 has to be taken in Recovery mode. You're in that mode if you start up to a screen titled "OS X Utilities."