Q: Messages being delivered and then disappearing from mail inbox
Recently I have been sent a number of email messages that have disappeared from my Mail inbox immediately after arrival. After some experiments, I can see the message downloading, and it appears in the Inbox summary list and triggers the incoming notification, but almost immediately disappears. It is no longer in inbox, and isn't in Junk or Trash either. Spotlight can't locate it anywher on the Mac.
The same thing happens to the same message on my iPhone. It arrives and disappears. If I log into iCloud before receiving the message on my phone or Mac, I can see it in the Inbox, but as soon as the message is received by Mail on the Mac, it disappears from the iCloud inbox.
It doesn't happen to all messages, or even all messages from the same person. It does happen with messages from different people in the same organisation.
For one message, I replied to several people in the same organisation. Each of them replied, but one of the replies disappeared on arrival. When one of the other people forwarded the missing reply to me, three times in succession, the forwarded reply arrived and then disappeared every time.
It's as if there's something broken in the content of some messages which means that the Mail app on both Mac and Phone deletes them (not into Trash, but completely)
I have no rules set up on either phone or Mac. I do have Junk mail filtering turned on, but the messages don't end up in the Junk folder, they are completely gone. I can't see any way to explicitly tell the Junk mail filter that a whole domain should not be treated as Junk (and anyway, the individual messages don't get through for me to hit the "not junk" button).
It's bizarre, but if I can't trust the Mail app and iCloud mail server to play nicely together and deliver all my messages reliably, then I'll have to swap back to Outlook or Google mail...
Anyone got any ideas what's going on?
bestest,
M.
MacBook Air, OS X El Capitan (10.11.4)
Posted on Mar 30, 2016 2:17 AM