mail app compaction error ??

[railthinner]

this is a new one to me -- mail keeps coming up with an error message that says "compaction error" My mailbox then shows 168 messages as unread (even though many of them are a year or more old) I went through them and remarked them as read but a couple hours late Mail runs through this cycle again and the same messages come up as unread. I've now deleted most of the messages I didn't need to keep but I still get this error and I've still got a handful of messages that keep showing up as unread every time mail tries to compact the mailbox.

what's up?

 

[railthinner]

it gets worse

now upon restarting Mail it has decided to reset itself and deleted one of my accounts including all mail in my inbox for that account.

someone please help me. how can I recover my lost mail?

think I must go vomit now.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

this is a new one to me -- mail keeps coming up with an error message that says "compaction error" My mailbox then shows 168 messages as unread (even though many of them are a year or more old) I went through them and remarked them as read but a couple hours late Mail runs through this cycle again and the same messages come up as unread. I've now deleted most of the messages I didn't need to keep but I still get this error and I've still got a handful of messages that keep showing up as unread every time mail tries to compact the mailbox.

what's up?

Sounds like your Mail caches are corrupted. Quit Mail if it's open, then go to ~/Library/Caches/Mail (where ~ is your home directory) and delete everything inside. Relaunch Mail and see if it's better.

 

[railthinner]

there is no bear in there

hmm... there doesn't appear to be anything in the caches folder related to Mail.

there is this though:
~/Library/Mail
which appears to contain my mailbox that I thought was forever lost.
Any idea if I can back this up and import it down the road?

thanks

 

[wrldwzrd89]

hmm... there doesn't appear to be anything in the caches folder related to Mail.

there is this though:
~/Library/Mail
which appears to contain my mailbox that I thought was forever lost.
Any idea if I can back this up and import it down the road?

thanks

Open Mail and choose "Import Mailboxes...", then in the Import From dialog, choose Mac OS X Mail, then it will ask you for the location of your mailbox file (~/Library/Mail) - navigate to that and choose it as the item to import. If that doesn't recover your mail...I don't know what to do.