MAIL - message stays in draft file after sending

[vckrijt]

Hi,
recently some send mail messages stay in the draft file, after successfull sending .. how come??
OSX 10.6.1 , MAIL 4.1

Victor
Holland

[tommaso]

Same here, Victor. Here's the link to my postings on the Apple discussion site (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2214261&tstart=0)...
Anybody got ideas to fix this?

[vckrijt]

yes, after posting this issue to a Dutch mac forum, several others indicated having the same problem ... no solution yet ...

[Las_Vegas]

Are these messages being sent through POP3 or IMAP accounts?

[tommaso]

For me, IMAP.

[Las_Vegas]

This is why they stay in your Draft folder. When you post a message via IMAP, the "Sent" message gets copied to the server. There's no place to put the local copy other than where it came from. You can then delete it if there's no more use for it.

[tommaso]

What I don't understand, though, is why this has never happened before. Only since 10.6.
Generally, when I write a message, I don't save it to Drafts, but complete it and send it on its way. I don't think it ever actually resides in Drafts...

[tommaso]

An additional clue is that, more often than not, the sent messages that get back into the drafts folder have an attachment...

[Las_Vegas]

I was assuming that the message had previously been saved to draft. You're right, this does appear to be a malfunction. I would try rebuilding the library. Let's see if I remember the procedure again… I'm actually doing this as I write the steps:1) Quit Mail
2) Move ~/Library/Mail to Desktop
3) Move ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist to Desktop
4) Run Mail.app
5) You should get a window titled "Mail Import" with the statement "Welcome to Mail"
5.1) Do not click Continue yet!
5.2) If you didn't get the Mail Import message, throw out ~/Library/Mail.
5.2.1) Mail will quit with an error.
5.2.2) Go back to Step 4
6) Rename ~/Library/Mail to Mail_New if present. (10.4 & 10.5)
7) Move the Mail folder from the desktop back into ~/Library/
8) Go back to Mail and click Continue.
9) Let Mail import your old folder. This can take some time if you have many accounts.
10) If step 9 takes an ungainly period, click "Cancel" and follow additional steps below:
10.1) Move com.apple.mail.plist from Desktop into ~/Library/Preferences (replace).
10.2) Run Mail again. Mail will now, re-import your accounts.

The sub-steps of 5 and step 10 are new with Snow Leopard. I had to perform step 10... Unfortunately, this is re-installing the original Preferences file and may introduce the problem again.

The only other solution I can come up with is to remove both Mail folder and preferences file and then setup all of your Mail accounts again. Not a big problem if you only have IMAP accounts...

[tommaso]

I would guess that step 3 is actually ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist...
Otherwise, it seems that just trashing that plist file and the ~/Library/Mail folder will allow an IMAP account to be fairly painlessly rebuilt. I'm using MobileMe to import Mail settings, though, and I probably shouldn't do that...

[Las_Vegas]

Yep... You're right. I've corrected it.