Smart mailboxes always reset after restarting mail

Question

Smart mailboxes always reset after restarting mail

Dear Mac-community,

I have a problem with my smart mailboxes in Apple Mail (High Sierra 10.13.2):

Closing and restarting the mail app always resets my smart mailboxes.

All changes made (editing an existing filter, creating a new filter or deleting one of the filters) are reset to the status as when I last opened the app.

My local mail folders are not affected (they can be changed etc.) - only the smart folders.

It feels like the responsible file holding the smart filter informations keeps being overwritten at each start (or something like this), but this is just a guess.

Any ideas how to resolve this issue? I want to be able to work with smart folders again.

Btw: Since I rarely make changes to the smart filter settings I can not say unfortunately, since when the problem exists.

Thanks for help.

J. Janda

IMAC (RETINA 5K, 27-INCH, LATE 2015), macOS High Sierra (10.13.2), null

Posted on Jan 5, 2018 2:22 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Joachim Janda Author

Level 1

8 points

Jan 6, 2018 7:12 AM in response to Joachim Janda

I managed to solve the problem by myself and give the answer, in case someone needs help with it.

The Mail data including some preference files is in Home/Library/Mail/V5/MailData

I first sorted the folder content by date changed.

I moved several files out of the folder to another one and quit / restarted the app to see what happened.

The File "SyncedSmartMailboxes.plist" was responsible for blocking the changes and resetting the filters.

Now it is working perfect again.

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Answer 2

Jan 7, 2018 3:38 AM in response to Joachim Janda

That is it = moved the plist to the desktop and the plist can now be deleted = I did this and deleted some smartmailboxes and restarted Mail and they're gone. Thanks for the easy answer....a reminder of a basic step to take some times.

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Answer 3

Jan 7, 2018 4:10 AM in response to tygb

With respect, tygb, Joachim and my problem was not that we could not delete the box, it was that it would reappear = easily solved by deleting the plist.

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Answer 4

tygb

Level 9

65,010 points

Jan 7, 2018 4:03 AM in response to Joachim Janda

Read some articles Use Smart Mailboxes to organize emails in Mail on Mac - Apple Support

Create or delete mailboxes in Mail on Mac - Apple Support

Right click on smart mail box , click on delete mail box .

Again click on delete , the smart mail box deletes from the apple mail application .

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Answer 5

tygb

Level 9

65,010 points

Jan 7, 2018 5:38 AM in response to Victoria Herring

May be you have solved the problem , thats good .And by entering in user library > containers > mail > V5 folder and finding the plist for it could more corrupt the mail account .

When ever there are problems in mail app delete the account and configure , any ways .

Best wishes !

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Answer 6

Jan 5, 2018 3:52 PM in response to Joachim Janda

Same set up Same Q = I have now deleted the Smart Mailbox on my Macbook Pro several times, and it reappears. I don't want it - I can recreate if I want it. How to delete forever the Smart Mailbox???

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Answer 7

Jan 6, 2018 8:46 AM in response to Joachim Janda

Just a little more help? My Smart Mailbox is already in date order so there's no sorting I would do right?

How do you move files out of a Smart folder to another one, since the files really aren't "in" the smart folder anyway but only referenced by it?

Couldn't it be easier to just delete the SyncedSmartMailboxes.plist and quit and restart Mail?

Thanks for working on this.

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Answer 8

Jan 7, 2018 12:55 AM in response to Victoria Herring

Hello, the procedure I described incl. sorting etc was all done in

Home/Library/Mail/V5/MailData

The Mail app itself was closed at this time.

Couldn't it be easier to just delete the SyncedSmartMailboxes.plist and quit and restart Mail?

This is basically what did the trick, except that I did not delete it but moved it out of the folder mentioned above.

Hope this explains it better. Good luck.

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