Apple mail clears and reloads messages in inbox

Yes, it started when I upgraded to El Capitan. My wife is now seeing it with her El Capitan system. Neither of us had an issue before the upgrade.

I found a potential solution in the Forum, but had to adjust it to El Capitan (thanks to Linc Davis). I'll post the results if this resolves this issue. If not, my next call is to Apple.

Here's Linc's instructions (somewhat modified):

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/V3/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. Warning: The process may take hours if you have gigantic mailboxes. For reasonable-sized mailboxes, it should only take a few minutes.

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

doogles wrote:

Hi, gregdepp -

Have you had a chance to try the solution you described above? I was waiting to give it a try until I heard your results.

Thanks!

Doug

It hasn't helped at all. I've been going around and around with Apple support on this and we've tried everything including deleting all accounts (even the ones working) and reestablishing them. We've had no luck, in fact its gotten worse. I've also worked with GoDaddy on the issue.

We finally escalated to engineering, who pulled a set of logs from my machine to investigate with. I've not heard anything yet. The senior support guy I've been working with works Sat to Weds, I plan to call back tomorrow to get a status update.

The upshot, I strongly recommend that you use an alternate email agent until this gets resolved, which really is a problem. I'm using MS Outlook, however there are others available. BTW: Outlook and my iOS mail solutions are working fine.

I'll update when I have an update from Apple.

Here's a status update:

Apple Engineering returned their assessment that it's not a problem with the Apple mail agent (surprise, surprise), but with GoDaddy. I pressed the service rep to contact Engineering again to get me some more information so that I can work with GoDaddy tomorrow. Just saying "its GoDaddy's problem" isn't helpful.

It turns out that they knew about the problem and saw it with MacOS 10.8, which got fixed.

I'll post something after I talk to GD tomorrow.

OK ... I finally got around to talking to GoDaddy about this problem. Here's their response.

They know about it and are hearing about it from their customers. Steve (the GD support guy) was very conversant in the problem but pointed the finger at Apple, El. Capital specifically (which is both understandable and frustrating). He said that the upgrade process reset some settings that is causing the problem and that the solution is to delete the mailbox from Mail and reestablish. When I told him that I'd done this, he said that there was nothing else they (GoDaddy) could do. BTW: I am going to retry the deletion solution one more time since when I did it the last time, I did it deleting some files that the Apple service rep told me to delete and I could have missed one.

We did walk through my settings and there was one that was wrong on the accounts showing the problem. The preferred IMAP SSL port number must be 993. I had been using 143 on the accounts showing the problem. I changed my SSL port number to 993 and immediately saw the problem. It's possible that this is what is needed and it's just reloading the messages and after the reload, it will work properly. However, I'm skeptical ...

After grousing that both Apple and Microsoft are in essence deprecating POP and IMAP to push folks to their cloud services, his recommendation was to move our mailboxes to MS Exchange hosted by GoDaddy. Which for our 4 mailboxes would be about $191.52/year vs $95.88/year for our IMAP mail boxes. The irony didn't escape me.

That said, I do think I'm going to consider this solution, though If we move to it will require some effort since to migrate the email to the Exchange server, I'll need to locally archive my mailboxes, then import them into Exchange. Not necessarily an operation that technical neophytes should consider.

It was very clear that both Apple and GoDaddy were not willing to engage the other to work though this issue. I suspect they are not getting enough complaints to make it worth while.

Sorry I don't have a better answer. Anyone else have a better idea?