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My mail.app is doing strange things....??

F

faithfulFrank

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 31, 2003
114
25
Central Florida
Hello all,
I am a mac novice, and lately there have been some strange things happenning with my mail account.
I have a G4 imac, and use the mail app that is part of Tiger. My e-mail address is a .mac account.

Lately, strange things have been happening. The other day I was gone for a few days, and when I checked my e-mail, I had 186 messages, which is a lot for me.
When I opened my inbox, I found that almost all of those messages were from weeks ago, and they were not new. I deleted them weeks ago.

How and why did they return?

Also, sometimes when I type an e-mail and send it, then like the next day there will show that there is a e-mail in my draft folder. I click it, and there is that e-mail I sent the day before. I check my sent box, and it WAS sent the day before.
It was never put in the draft folder, and was typed and sent right away the day before.

Why do e-mail appear in my draft folder when they were already sent a day or two before?

Today, I sent an e-mail. It went fine. I click on my sent folder an hour later, and there it is, the last e-mail I sent. Now, I'm just looking at the screen, not touching the keyboard or my mouse, and instantly, the e-mail dissappeared, like I deleted it, but I did not. I then checked the trash folder, and it was not there.
I went to safari and logged into my .mac account, and it was not anyewhere there also.....like it was never sent.

The biggest thing was the other day, someone hijacked my .mac account and stole my e-mails for about 24 hours. I posted about this already, and immediately changed my .mac password, etc. After that, I have gotten my
e-mail.

I do not think the hijacking has anything to do with the other mail problems, because it was doing these things before the hijacking.

I've repaired permissions, but I've been leery and did not do the last OS update. Should I reinstall mail? Is there a way to do that and not lose everything?

I've just read what I've typed here so far, and it looks like a post that was written by someone who does not have both oars in the water. I assure you, I'm not nuts.

I've considered just dropping my .mac account and going back to my old roadrunner account.

Or maybe I should just install this new Thunderbird mail app I just found out about here.

I'm to the point that i'm going to get paranoid soon. Any thoughts? Is there something more I should do?

thank you in advance for your help.

Frank D.
 
Okay, here's what I'd do. Close Mail. Go to a folder named Mail in your Home's Library, open it, and drag everything inside it to a new Folder on your Desktop. This means everything (on your computer at least) is backed up.

Now, find a file named com.apple.mail.plist and drag it to the Desktop too.

Okay, now when you open Mail, it should be like-new. Put in your .Mac account details again and re-download all your emails. If your problems are Mail-based and not .Mac-based, this should have solved them. Good luck and tell me if there are bits you don't like in what I've said and I'll try to make it clearer. :)
 
Thanks a lot! I was having the same problem. I would delete a message and then get notified of new mail, which was the message I had deleted a few minutes prior. How annoying lol
 
I have been having similar issues as of late with deleted emails resurrecting themselves as new. The issue is occuring with all my .mac family pack members as well. I'm convinced there is something going on with the .mac mail servers lately (perhaps sending out multiple copies of the same email).

I would contact them with this but unfortunatly the .mac support has been less than helpful in an ongoing issue I have with one of my .mac members unable to access our shared folder. They told me 2 weeks ago that it was being looked into I havn't heard back from them since, I've since emailed them three times to no response. And of course its all but impossible to call .mac support.


I see on the .mac site that there was

Mac Mail will be down for a small number of .Mac customers due to scheduled maintenance from 9:00 PM to 11:59 PM PDT on 5/31/06. During this time, access to Mail from a desktop application or from the web is not possible. All other .Mac services are unaffected.
Last Updated: 5/30/06

Perhaps the email issue is now fixed.
 
My technique was in reference to the app named Mail playing up but if everyone seems to be having .Mac troubles, then maybe it's an Apple server-side problem. I know I'm having iSync issues with iCal and .Mac at the moment. Perhaps it's related. I don't use .Mac's email account so I can't comment on whether I'm having issues in that respect.
 
I don't know, I think my exchange account was doing it as well...
 
Well, I know it is not nice to say, but i'm somewhat relieved that I'm not the only one having problems with mail and .mac

i'll try what madjew suggested.....I'll wait until a bit later when my son is home......he's more proficient then I on these things.

Also in mail, I get some e-mails, read them, then it shows I have new mail, only to find that i've already read them.

I did not find .mac to be overly helpful. i'm glad we have these forums!

Frank D.
 
MJ,
After reading your directions again, I decided it lookd easy enough to try myself.
I found that mail in the library, made a new folder on my desktop, clicked those 10 files and moved them over to the new folder.

1) were they supposed to move over there and leave that original mail folder in library empty, or was I supoposed to just copy them? I got a bit nervous having that original folder empty.

Then, I found that com.apple.mail.plist using spotlight. I did not know another way of finding it. I found it, but when I clicked on it in spotlight, it said I needed to choose an application to open it. When I tried to drag it from spotlight, it would not go.

2) what did I do wrong?

Thanks! Frank D.
 
FWIW, the .Mac servers have apparently been glitchy for the past few days. Often when I mark mail as "read" it pops up a few minutes later marked "unread." I tried rebuilding my .Mac mailbox, to no avail. If I open the Activity Viewer window in Mail, I see it periodically updating the .Mac server, which takes quite a long time. I think Apple is having an IMAP problem that they're not telling us about. Is anyone else seeing this?
 
faithfulFrank said:
1) were they supposed to move over there and leave that original mail folder in library empty, or was I supoposed to just copy them? I got a bit nervous having that original folder empty.
Click to expand...


Yeah, empty the original folder. :)


faithfulFrank said:
Then, I found that com.apple.mail.plist using spotlight. I did not know another way of finding it. I found it, but when I clicked on it in spotlight, it said I needed to choose an application to open it. When I tried to drag it from spotlight, it would not go.

2) what did I do wrong?
Click to expand...


Okay, click on it whilst holding the COMMAND key (assuming you're using the Spotlight menu and not the separate window) to display it in Finder. You don't need to open it, you just need to drag it to the Desktop. Take not of the folder you found it in because if this doesn't work you can put the PLIST back and regain all your old customised settings. :)
 
IJ Reilly said:
FWIW, the .Mac servers have apparently been glitchy for the past few days. Often when I mark mail as "read" it pops up a few minutes later marked "unread." I tried rebuilding my .Mac mailbox, to no avail. If I open the Activity Viewer window in Mail, I see it periodically updating the .Mac server, which takes quite a long time. I think Apple is having an IMAP problem that they're not telling us about. Is anyone else seeing this?
Click to expand...

Yes, .Mac is in disarray in terms of Mail and Synching right now.

I haven't been able to synch for two days...and I practically require it to live.
 
IJ Reilly said:
FWIW, the .Mac servers have apparently been glitchy for the past few days. Often when I mark mail as "read" it pops up a few minutes later marked "unread." I tried rebuilding my .Mac mailbox, to no avail. If I open the Activity Viewer window in Mail, I see it periodically updating the .Mac server, which takes quite a long time. I think Apple is having an IMAP problem that they're not telling us about. Is anyone else seeing this?
Click to expand...

lol, I had this problem today. But anyway, a while back Mail somehow screwed up about ten of my e-mails. When I would open message 1, it would display message 4, and when I would open message 4, it would display message 2. This caused several legit e-mails to go to the spam folder... I forgot how I fixed it, but Mail can have some serious issues at times.
 
dear Mad Jew,

Thank you. I did what you said. Now I have that mail backup file on my desktop and that com.apple.mail.plist on my desktop. I found it in a big file called preferences that had a lot of .plist files in it.

What do I do now from here?

If I click on that .plist file and it tells me to choose an application to use it in.

Just leaving it on my desktop fixes my mail somehow, or do I do something else.

Sorry I sound like an idiot here, but my mac usually works so well I have not needed to fix too many things.

Thanks, Frank D.
 
mad jew said:
Same here. The fact they don't tell us on their support site just makes it that little bit worse, too. :(
Click to expand...

They finally said a few .Mac customers are having intermittent problems synching...LIES!

.Mac email is currently unavailable for a small number of .Mac customers. .Mac sync services are also currently intermittently unavailable to some users. Changes made to synced information will be reflected when the problem is resolved. All other .Mac services are unaffected.
Last Updated: 6/1/06
Click to expand...
 
faithfulFrank said:
What do I do now from here?
Click to expand...


Okay, well it rally does sound like a .Mac issue at this stage but we can follow tis through all the same, it shouldn't hurt. The purpose of dragging the PLIST to the Desktop is to get it out of the large Preferences folder so that when you next open up Mail, it will revert back to its original settings. It should give you the opportunity to reconfigure your account, put your .Mac details back in and then it should redownload your emails. There may have been a corrupt section of either the Mail folder or the PLIST that you dragged to the Desktop, which is why recreating them (set as defaults) may help.

So, all you have to do now is open Mail and put your .Mac details in at the prompts. If you're not immediately shown a wizard to set up a new account, select Add Account from the File menu. Best of luck. :)

Alternatively, you could put the everything back where you found it and sit out the .Mac server issues. It's up to you. :)

IanF0729, thanks for the heads up. :)
 
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