Mail not downloading messages

[Bristol410]

Can anyone help me and suggest what's gone wrong with one of my POP accounts in Mail? I was curious that I had not received any messages on one account for a couple of weeks, but it's mainly mailing lists that go to that account and traffic is sometimes light so I didn't notice sooner. Once I realised I'd been missing postings, I eventually discovered a couple of hundred messages on the server that hadn't been downloaded by Mail, but I can't work out how to get them downloaded! If I select Get Info on the account in Mail, it tells me there are 198 messages on the server, and they are all marked as new, ie not downloaded yet. But checking for new messages results in no messages being detected.

I've tried disabling and re-enabling the account and changing the passwords to try to get Mail to recognise a change and check the account properly, but no luck so far. Any better ideas?

 

[clevin]

try this

Try this solution for corrupt/problematic emails on your POP server...

In OS X Mail, click on the In Box of the problem account in Get Info (Ctrl-I).
The Account Info window will show up and list all of the emails on the server.
Highlight the "Sender Unknown" "No Subject" emails in the list.
Click the Remove from Server button at the bottom of the window.

copy right belongs to
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?p=369192

PS, try Thunderbird

 

[Bristol410]

Wow, thanks, that has helped, sort of! I looked closer and found there were a few messages that had a size of 0kb, so I deleted them and Mail then downloaded the rest, the Activity window showing it was downloading 191 messages. However about half of them have now disappeared without trace - they show up in the Get Info window as having been removed from my Mac They're not in the Trash or the Junk folders and the rules to send them into correct mailboxes worked fine for the other half so I trust them. Is there a way to mark them as new to force Mail to download them again?

You're possibly right about Thunderbird - I keep trying it and I'm almost convinced! Mail is nicely integrated with so much other stuff though.

 

[clevin]

i don't know this, but it there any setting in mail.app's preference allow u to download "un-new" messages?

(im using an IMAP server, so i have no idea about pop3 in mail.app)

 

[Bristol410]

Well I found a workaround in the end. I set up Gmail to collect POP mail from my 'stuck' account, and then Mail.app downloaded the messages from GMail quite happily.

 

[fatboybuddha]

Thanks

@Clevin: Thanks mate. Worked wonders.