Mac Mail - again.

[EdSinger]

I have moaned here before about my least favourite Mac OS App – Mac Mail – having had a few disasters but now I am worried that this ghastly piece of work will ultimately cause unrecoverable problems - or disasters. No one on this forum could help or explain how dependant mailboxes could become unhitched from their parent and reconnected to entirely unrelated mailboxes. Now I find that I cannot even add a mailbox. All the actions appear normal, except that on completion the added box is not to be found in the 'on my mac' list - or anywhere else. A possible reason is some undeclared limit on the permissible number of mailboxes. Following all my 'on my mac' boxes is a box named "com.apple.Mail.backup". It is empty. It is followed by another empty box named "Recovered Messages", then by another named "Recovered Messages-1" - then Recovered Messages–2 - and so on down to 32. All empty. Deleting them is as for adding a Mailbox. Nothing to suggest that anything is unusual during deletion - whether all at once or one at a time - except that they are still there - untouchable apparently. NB I bought Postbox 3 years ago and have kept it up to date, but have not dared implement it as Mac Mail is so fragile that I fear losing my valuable stuff so I have lived (unhappily) with the primitive and unreliable and error-prone message-composing facilities - redolent of the early days of Windows. Any help will be welcome.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

Yes, I remember our previous discussion about this, and I never found any good answer as to why it was happening. Sorry to hear you are still having issues, as it seemed to have settled down towards the end of the last thread of discussion.

At this point, it actually may be a good time to setup the email account(s) in Postbox. You can setup accounts in more than one email application, as they store their data in different places. That may help prevent losing anything further, as you will have multiple copies of the emails/mailboxes. It could also prove helpful to troubleshoot the issue further, to see if the same thing happens in Postbox.

• How many email accounts are there setup in Mail?
• Who is/are the email provider(s)?
• If they have webmail access, are all of the emails/mailboxes shown if you login that way via a browser, or are these mailboxes only in the On My Mac section of the Mail application?
• Do you have the email account(s) setup on another computer and/or mobile device?

Honestly, it is kind of tricky to troubleshoot these uncommon issues remotely sometimes. I wonder if it may be a good idea to visit a local Apple Store if possible, so someone can take a look in person. We're happy to keep at it though.

C