start Apple Mail from scratch
 

Hi guys,

Any help here with Apple Mail?

I would like to re-install Apple Mail. Since Maverick upgrade i have so many little wrong things that working with Mail have been considerable annoying. I can only guess it is corrupted now or Mavericks upgrade with Mail has turned as good as any Microsoft product.


Here are the problems so far.

1) All draft are saved in the draft folder even tough the email was sent. I went to Account>Folders>Do not save draft and the SAVE, but all the time i open Mail the option is checked again as nothing changed. Here is a picture. It is in Spanish Apple Mail version but you'll get the idea.

http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?pi...bWAb5AwAamZZm1

that Draft duplicate is confusing because you cannot be 100% sure you actually sent the email or not.




2) I put a previous post without of this problem but no solution so far. Every time a write an email if i want to write back a paragraph and put the cursor in the middle of it the new text added will start at the end of the text. It is incredible annoying.

I am not sure if my explanation is very clear...but in this image

http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?pi...rYnikzXiYS5Ir0

the whole of the text is supposed to be highlighted but in fact Mail is only taking into account part of the text.




3) Rules do not work anymore, they just don't. Even if i change them every time i get a mail which is supposed to be in a particular folder is not working for me.



SOLUTION (?)
How can i re-install? How to back up and start from new? How can i delete all rules and Mail Preferences? I would like to give it a second try or downgrade to previous OS version when life was simpler and better. By the way, i did reset the SMC and PRAM and used ONYX to clean all generic preferences but Apple Mail keeps not working right.


Sorry for so many words. Any ideas? ;)

Best,
S

I doubt there is anything wrong with the install of the Application. First thing to do is Delete both accounts and put them back. All the mail is stored on the server (ITS IMAP) so nothing to loose. You can prove to your self by signing in via Web to account/s.

Second thing one would normally also do is see if there is a user issue. Create another admin user and sign in as that user and add your mail accounts there.

Make sure your Machine has the Mavericks update including the one for mail, though the real fix for some may be in 10.9.1.

I have found that particularly with large exchange based mail accounts 80K emails for example Mavericks mail does not do well.

Mavericks goal with all Apple Apps and the OS was to save CPU and Energy Cycles to make batteries last even longer and to make the computer more responsive. Think they made some mistakes.

My Gmail accounts have been fine with Mavericks and I have 6 with a total of around 40K messages.

I would hang tight and wait for 10.9.1. There are some problems with Mail in Mavericks, but from what has been published about 10.9.1, you can expect plenty of fixes there.

Generally, if you have a problem with an app, reinstalling it is the 1000th thing on the list of Things To Do.
(You often see on forums such as these people posting "I've reinstalled 12 times, and it still doesn't work! ;))

The Mail app package in /Applications is generally read-only. Once installed, nothing there is updated or modified. So, unless your drive is corrupting files (in which case your problems would likely not be confined to Mail), you can assume that the Mail app is as it should be. It's very rare for an installer to randomly not install something properly, but then install it correctly the next time.

The problem areas are in the preference file, the Mailbox data, and caches. These are the files that are written to and modified on a daily basis, and where corruption can therefore creep in.

Anthlover gives good advice that fits in with what I've said here.

thanks for the fast reply anth,

What do you mean by "delete" the account? I did a simple trick of just moving the all the files inside the "Mail" folder content to the desktop to see if that might solve the trouble but i ended up with all the inboxed empty, blank. I thought well it will be like the last time when the emails database is going to be uploaded by the IMAP server and i played around for a while but nothing happens.

Thanks for the various good advice regarding the next steps ;)

thanks for your insight ben,

i will follow anthlover steps to see if i can solve the issue. It is interesting that somebody acknowledges a problem between the current Mavericks version and Apple Mail.

Best,

You delete from mail prference the accounts in the accounts tab. Close mail after, reopen and add accounts back. It will take a bit after accounts sre added back for them to populate.

good data!

Thanks anthlover ;)

Hi thought i would chime in.

I have been burnt so bad with Exchange Web Services in SL/Lion/ML that i just cannot go there. We mostly ended up using IMAP and/or OWA for our Mac users. Then we decided enough and migrated all our users (some kicking and screaming) to Outlook 2011 and TBH on the whole it has been good with Our Exch 2010/2013 deployments and Hosted Exch.

The Exchange engineers also have done some backend work on EWS but i have little info on that.

Apple mail is a funny fish. It has a database called "envelope index" which has a tendency to blow up causing all sorts of odd behaviour. Yes deleting Accounts (never delete a POP account !) and adding again will often help but my users have big mailboxes and sometimes just not practical when they are out on road.

So our single most successful 'fix" for many issues is....drum roll

Quit Mail
remove /Users/username/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Envelope Index
Open Mail
It will say Importing mail this in fact is rebuilding the local cache database of all mail in your individiual mail folders. Can take a while with my users without SSD and huge mailboxes but quicker than pulling down mail again while offsite and killing our WANs in process.

Thanks for sharing the knowledge agentx.
Good data on the Envelop Index stuff. Is it safe to remove right? Here are another Envelope Index too...but i guess only the single one is for the purpose of being remove it, right?
http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?pi...pxPH6QdPg8rfU0

Cheers,

I have destroyed that file 100s of times ;-) so yes !
It is a mail index or database. That Mail will rebuild on start up.

destroying the file
 

Is it nuking that file loosely equivalent of using the Rebuild mail database menu choice?

Still feel its cleaner to delete the accounts. One solution path or anther should bring relative sanity.

OF course, because you can always restore it from your backup! Everything is safe to delete! :D

Hi Ant, as such "rebuild" from my understanding will rebuild individual index files (mbox) for Mailboxes and will force re-download of IMAP/Exchange email. I don't think it removes the envelope index it might even make it more messed up. It more works with corrupted Mbox index and mail messages.
Applecare will say reinstall the OS rather than remove the "Envelope Index" as once again Apple are using the ostrich technique when it comes to long standing problems.

"You might need to rebuild a mailbox to update the list of messages in the mailbox. For example, if messages appear to be missing or garbled, or if you can’t find all relevant messages when you search using Entire Message. Rebuilding a mailbox can take a while depending on how many messages are in the mailbox.

Select a mailbox, and then choose Mailbox > Rebuild.
When you rebuild mailboxes for Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Exchange accounts, locally stored messages and attachments are discarded, and the messages and attachments are downloaded again from the server to your Mac. Your mailbox appears empty until the download is complete"

TY. Rebuild only sometimes helps. I find deleting the account works pretty well. Never tried nuking the envelope.

Sorry guys, but i am a bit confused now, should i or shouldn't i delete the Envelop Index file? it is on debate now that will help or make things even more complicated.

by the way, very interesting arguments and i am learning quite a bit now.

Apple Mail very very annoying problem to be able to insert text in the middle or a paragraph is not showing for the last couple of hours. I just moved the entire content of the Mail Folder to the desktop and then moved back to original location...bizarre but it is working a bit better. If the problem persist i will go deeper indeed.

Best,

Your IMAP based gmail is server based nothing you do is going to cause you or server based email harm.

The simplest and likely fixes are the ones I mentioned at the outset. Delete the accounts from mail preferences. You may find them also again under System preferences INTERNET and would want to delete them there too. Creating a new Admin System user and logging in as that user would also be a second measure to take if deleting of the mail accounts does not work.

I do not have personal experience with deleting the Mbox, but if Agent X says that has been helpful for his clients that then I am 100 percent sure it is also a good fix.

None of these things can overcome the fact that Mavericks mail is a bit challenged. Do make sure you have Mavericks fully updated and be on the look out for 10.9.1 As I also mentioned by personal machine with Gmail on it has been pretty good, but not as good as ML. My work machine that is Exchange based account has been a bigger issue.

As someone that supports 100s of users in mixed environments mainly with EXCH/GAB/IMAP.
It all depends on symptoms. And to me removing and adding an account is last resort as in hosted mail system setups this is going to pull down 1-25Gb of mail depending on user and killing the WAN bandwidth. I see account removal as last resort. But yes sometimes it comes to that.

Here is my basic troubleshooting flow for Apple Mail
1. Maibox Rebuild if just issue with a few emails not displaying or mail showing in Webmail not locally.
2. Send and receive Authentication issues - keychain entry removal and add passwords again.
3. Apple mail being an unreasonable bîtch = Envelope index & mail preferences
4. Apple mail being a complete ass and nothing else working= Remove and re-add account
5. NO APPLE I AM NOT REINSTALLING THE OS to sort out an issue with a program ;-)

I am not saying wrong/right here...just how we do it. And believe me i have seen it all !

In fact I often do Envelope Index removal first nowadays ;-)
Seriously i must have done this a 1000 times !

Nice flow chart including the commentary
 

AgentX from his symptoms which sounded pretty wildly broken where would you start in your break/fix flow chart?

Agreed no wrong or right. It is server mail so all one tries to do is fix with the least impact to the user, infrastructure, least amount of time, and with the least amount of re-work.

thanks for the good tips guys,

i just deleted my Mail Folder content and slowly rebuilding the 43,000 emails database on IMAP.

i have to say i wasn't able to find all the settings in Preferences like
.com.apple.Mail.plist
com.apple.mail-shared.plist

i did delete them a couple of days ago, but strangely they are not there anymore. I would assume one deleted they auto restore with a new version when opening the App. again, right?

I did an search with Easy Find App. a great and deep under the rug searcher but no .plist kind of file related to email appear.

I am afraid the bug which doesn't allow me to write text in middle of a sentence might still be activated if i don't delete the Pref files. The problem is wasn't able to find them.

If the problem persist i might create another Admin User account as last resort, then.

thanks for all the great and good info ;)

Hi Ant, yes overall would have done.
1. Envelope index and plists.
2. Then if not worked renamed mail folder. Removed plists. Nuke and pave mail accounts.
Restart and setup. There is plist caching in Mavericks which has caught me out a few times.

TBH I think he might have folder mapping woes and maybe Root folder path issues.
It's an different kind of IMAP gmail :-) and after needs tweaking on server and client side. we have had odd issues even with the We just say use chrome browser and webmail until We can sort it out.

Another trick we use is just to use the download headers first for first sync then toggle all mail and attachments setting.

You should only see this for IMAP and Exchange accounts.

In Accounts, under the Mailbox behaviors tab select to NOT save to server. Save to the local Drafts folder. This will stop the extra copies in drafts.

Mail saves a messages as you are composing and creates a draft message. It should remove when sending but often does not creating confusion.

Yep long standing bug. But 99% of users I work with want drafts in sync between devices and although using local Drafts is a fix it is not ideal for multi device people.