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Mail App Inbox Falsely Reports Unread Messages

J

johnnyonthemac

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 26, 2012
19
0
Hey everyone
I have a macbook pro 10.7.3. I use the Mail email client. Lately the inbox is showing I have 13 new (or unread) messages when I do not. For about 2 months it was showing I had 1 unread message. Now it says I have 13.

I've tried marking all messages as Read. Does not work.

Any ideas on how to correct this? - or what causes this?

Thanks for any insights.
 
Just had to fix this for someone recently. Backup your mail first, then do the following:

Quit Mail.
Open ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/ (you can simply hit Cmd-Shift-G in the Finder and copy/paste that in the box that appears).
Find the file(s) that start with Envelope Index (there were three on my system, but it will vary). Toss them in the Trash.
Reopen Mail.

It will take a while to recreate your mailboxes and reimport the messages, and then you shouldn't see that problem again.

jW
 
False icon badges have been an ongoing problem with OS X Lion. I hope they fix it with ML. I've seen it with iMessage and ClamXAV. I've even seen hung badges on iOS apps as well on my iPad/iPhone. Apple just can't figure it out I guess.
 
Any chance you have one or more RSS feeds set up in Mail?

I'm using IMAP mail (with several accounts) and every few weeks Mail decides that an RSS message that I've read and deleted needs to be re-posted. The annoying thing is that it doesn't show as an unread RSS message. Instead, it's up there somewhere in my inbox, and I have to search for a bolded message to find it.

I don't know why this is, and after I figured out what caused it I haven't bothered to see if the root cause can be found and fixed.
 
I had this problem, it turned out that I had moved messages to folders before reading them, sometimes via the same hosted Exchange account on my iPhone. The unread count includes messages in subfolders that are unread (at least I think so!)
 
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