Hello, All:
Well, I'm back. Lots of new noise here in recent days, so I figured I'd join the chorus...
I still haven't tried any of the fixes we've unearthed here as a hive. Stubborn, I guess, or worried that if I diddle around with those nasty, disease-infected THIRD PARTIES that Apple will disown me when I have to show up at tech support for something else -- which I just had to do today.
I was having this fluky thing happening where Mail kept recovering messages onto my Air (the Air itself, as in ON MY MAC), and because it started to do this with both inbound and outbound messages, I was left wondering whether anything was ever sent, blah, blah, blah. I'd move or delete the messages -- and they would come back. I'd delete the RECOVER folder -- and it would come back. Sound familiar, anyone? Apple does Groundhog Day.
Thus, I had to spend nearly two hours on the phone today with Apple, passing through no fewer than three levels of expertise before Ryan, a Senior Advisor (he helps the old people, I guess), was able to dig into the Library files for my Mail, where he nuked a repository of old stuff. For now (just hours later) it seems to have solve the problem. That problem.
But, in the process of the various calls, I felt I needed to explain to each tech why they were being faced with someone who was already fried, impatient, and sick to death of the bits of rotten Apple that keep coming back from the compost heap. At the Ryan level, he (naturally; it's the Apple Way) felt he might be able to have an easy solution. Also naturally, he pretty much went through some of the things that we Hivers have already tried, and tried again. So we skipped those, thank you. He asked for and I sent him the thread. We went out to Safari and into my account through iCloud itself where my interface showed that I have ZERO (0) stored in there. His point of access, however, which differs from what we lowly Users can see of our own records, showed one errant text file (about 22k, I think). Ah-ha! Ah-ha?....
So, Ryan had me turn off iCloud Drive on all three of my Apple devices (Air, iPhone, iPad), reasoning that this is where the problem lies buried. Because I'm not now using iCloud Drive to store anything, nor had I been doing so intentionally, it's a non-issue. That's all we did was OFF iCloud Drive. Then I wiped out all the shortcuts, first on the Air, then on the iPhone. By the time I got to the iPad, they'd cleaned themselves out. Clean and clear.
With great initiative and much to his credit (the red-shirted techs that Tim Cooke beams down first to the alien planet of Support do their best, but um, what always happens to the guys in those red uniforms?), Ryan even went off after our call and dug further. He called me back and wants to set me into Test Mode (again!) so that The Engineers can go into my User backups and clean out the whole library. I told him that in the last round with Tech this is exactly what The Engineers told me (through the front-end red-shirt tech) they could or would not do. Ryan seems to have changed the course or history and has permission on this now, but I have asked that we hold on Test Mode until see if with iCloud Drive off the shortcut list stays clean, and if the fix on the original issue with Mail messages being recovered onto the Air sticks as well.
Now, several hours later, it's, well, weird. The stupid, native On my way! shortcut (which I can't even type now in its shortcut form because the Air overrides with the long form) has come back on the Air, but the iPad and iPhone are clean. None of which makes any sense, even relative to all the other craaap we've all experienced.
Will report back.
Sigh...
