10.4.1 has killed my Mail.app 2.0
 

After updating to 10.4.1, Mail.app 2.0 (which I shall call "mail") no longer shows messages in several folders (sometimes ALL the folders including the inbox). The messages are all there, as they show up when I use search. In ~/Library/Mail/ I have all my folders in good shape (I made a copy of this folder just in case).

Surely I am not the only one with this problem!?!? I am going to try to use mail from 10.4 (thankfully, my wife didn't update yet).

[5 minutes later] OK, I tried with the old version of mail (727/730), and nothing works either. It says its "Sorting messages" forever.

This is unbelievable. :mad:

[edit] I also want to add a very simple and obvious bug. I cannot change the threads viewing option. It is currently on "Organize by threads" and if I try to choose "Expand all threads", it does nothing. I also cannot turn off "Organize by threads".

Just what exactly to beta testers do? :confused:

As you seem to think this problem is happening to all Mail 2.0 users, let me tell you that I'm having no such problem (or any other problem) with Mail.app on 10.4.1

Perhaps the problem is related to a 3rd-party plugin etc that you and your wife both have installed?

Try creating a fresh user account (in System Preferences / Accounts) and see if that new user has the same problem.

I have no installed third party plugins. I read all about those. Thanks for the tip though.

I've been using Mail.app in its various incarnations since 10.0, and I've never had a problem. Ever.

There is a long thread on Apple's discussions board about problems *similar* to mine. I just thought I'd see what people here thought.

[edit] I didn't say (nor do I really even imply) that this is a universal problem. It's just that I have a very vanilla setup (albeit with lots of folders and four email accounts), so I don't see what is unusual about my setup.

And what happens when you add a new OS X user and set up just one of your email accounts in Mail 2.0 for that user?

To any other people who want to live in the fantasyland where this problem is mine alone, see this discussion thread (and I'm sure others will follow). Thy guy's symptoms are mine exactly:

http://discussions.info.apple.com/we...Rz.5@.68afcf48

As yet, there does not appear to be a solution.

About setting up another user: this will be complicated, especially since I'll have to import all my mail and mail settings just to verify. Can you explain how this will help? Thanks.

I don't see why this is such a big deal - it shouldn't take you more than 5 minutes to re-enter your mail account info. You don't need to import your email messages - just set up the Mail account and see if you can send & receive mail.
This will help since it will eliminate all the other things that are in your current user account that might be causing the problem. It is a step towards a "vanilla" configuration.

Or is your problem only with certain mailboxes? Finding out the parameters of the problem is the first step in troubleshooting.

By the way, my original comment about not everyone having this problem was in response to your "Just what exactly to beta testers do?". That seemed to imply that your problem was something that ought to have been caught by Apple's testers. I suspect that your situation is somehow unusual enough that it was not caught in testing.

Thanks, but I have no problem sending and receiving mail (what gave you that impression?). I have the problem as described in the Apple Discussion thread above: mail in the inbox and some folders (sometimes all folders) has disappeared (though it is all still on the computer as evidenced by looking in ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/).

This should have been caught as I have done nothing unusual. People who install strange things like httpmail etc. should not be surprised when stuff breaks. I haven't done any of that. The only thing I did was to change the application's icon once.

Okay - the ideal was to see if you can reproduce the problem in another (freshly created) user account. The idea of sending & receiving mail was to built up a few messages in your mailboxes so as to see if they might disappear.
If no problems occurred with just a few messages, you would then proceed step by step to make the new user's Mail account more and more similar to the one that is having trouble. Next you would import the messages from one of your current mailboxes. Any trouble? No? Okay import the messages from another mailbox. ...
Then go on to set up another of your email accounts to that user. And import mailboxes for that account, one by one.

Eventually you will have reproduced the mail account of your current user.
Then we would know that it must be something else in your current user account. Maybe it is merely corrupt preferences - you might try this now - quit Mail.app, move the "com.apple.mail.plist" preference file from ~/Library/Preferences to the Desktop temporarily and then restart Mail.app

Or maybe your mailboxes are somehow corrupt. If you followed the re-importing procedure above, you could just copy the mailboxes from the user account that worked to your account.

Thanks for your explanation. I've tried the preferences trick, nothing.

http://discussions.info.apple.com/we...4261@.68af5a24

http://discussions.info.apple.com/we...4261@.68afcf48

I'm betting 99.9% of this is a bug in Mail, so I'm not going to waste a whole day doing what I pay Apple to do.

I don't think what I outlined above would take more than an hour or so, but if Mail.app is working okay for you now, I guess you can wait and see if this gets fixed in the next Tiger update.

I did it.

I think that this image is all we need to see at this point:

http://homepage.mac.com/femtobio/PhotoAlbum14.html

I created a brand new user, and I imported one of the mailboxes and it says I have 337 unread messages, and 0 messages. Try that one in your Intro to Logic class!

Okay, so if I understand you properly, you have reproduced the problem with a freshly created user account. Now let's try to fix the problem using that same user account.

What happens if you do "Rebuild" from Mail.app's "Mailbox" menu?

If that doesn't fix it, try removing messages one at a time, or several at a time (maybe divide & conquer: remove half, then half of what remains, etc) by using Finder (the messages are under a "Messages" folder under ~/Library/Mail/name_of_mail_account/name_of_mailbox) and then doing a "Rebuild". The idea is that maybe the problem is related to a particular message that is in your mailbox.
Since you are working with the freshly created user and these messages are copies of ones that you have in your original user account, you don't care about screwing things up irreparably by doing this sort of experiment.

By the way, is this a POP account or an IMAP account?

Rebuild does nothing. I've tried it and it's in the other posts on apple's forums.

I have the "account" setup as POP, but that crap you saw in the picture is for a mailbox that I imported (using import>other). I saw each and every mail get nicely imported (it shows the subject as it progresses), and then there were zero messages. It's a bug.

Thanks for your help, but I am really too busy to work on this further. It's too random a problem, and even if we do find a solution, like "you cannot have Word attachments, or messages with the word 'laser' in it," I wouldn't consider that a 'solution'. After all, what is "email" in general but a bunch of text. How could there be an offending email? Too many messages with the number '42' in them???

I'm am now fully convinced that this is a bug in Mail, and I hope they fix it so I can stop reading my damn mail in a web browser.

Email depends on a well-defined protocol that specifies what format each message should be. If a message doesn't follow that format, an email client (like Mail.app) should reject it. But a bug in Mail.app might allow a non-conforming message to cause problems.

It sounds like it probably is a bug in Mail.app
But note that if Apple isn't able to reproduce the bug, they won't be able to fix it. Efforts by users to narrow down the cause of the bug are extremely useful for this reason.

I have this bug now. I went from 10.3.9 -> 10.4 -> 10.4.1 and Mail worked fine. Then, I deleted some software and managed to bugger 10.4.1 to the point where I had to reinstall the system. My installation disk was for 10.4, and when I tried to reinstall the installer baulked because the current system was newer than the one I was installing, and it forced me to go back a step and change the type of installation (can't remember the detail, but it just required me to uncheck a button). Anyway, after that, I was able to install 10.4, immediately got the update to 10.4.1, and now Mail is doing this stupid stuff exactly as described by mactectomy. I deleted Mail and and reinstalled it from the 10.4 disk and the problems persist. The problems persist in newly-created users and with different sets of messages. Another aspect of the problem has something to do with the Number (#) column in the mail window. If I try and re-order the messages by clicking on the header to the Number column, I lose the ability to reorder messages via any means, and cmd-Q sends Mail into a hang that requires a force-quit to get out of.

Ah, worked out the problem.... After reinstalling 10.4 and upgradig to 10.4.1, I ended up with Mail 2.0 (727/730), not the latest version. Software Update didn't pick this up. Replacement of Mail 2.0 with the latest version I could find (Mail 2.0.1 (730), which I had on an uncorrupted installation 10.3.9 -> 10.4 -> 10.4.1 on another Mac) solved all my problems.

Disappearing email...
 

Dear All,

I'm also suffering from the 'disappearing emails' problem. I've been up all night trying to fix it as a number of important emails have completedly disappeared (they're not even in the ~/Library/Mail).

Mail appears to randomly move emails to the trash, then - if you've set Mail up to empty the trash on quitting the appication - you lose them, apparently forever.

I've tried:

1. Trashing the .plist (preferences) - didn't work.

2. Using 'Rebuild' (Mailbox > Rebuild) - didn't work.

3. Digging around in ~/Library/Mail to see if the messages are still on the hard drive, but not showing up in Mail. - They're gone.

4. Erasing Mail's cache files, rebooting and restarting mail - didn't work.

I'm running OS X 10.4.1, Mail 2.0.1.

Does anyone have any suggestions, alternativel can anyone recommend a good alternative to Mail till these issues are resolved?

Many thanks.

Chris Murphy

When you delete the mail .plist file, you delete information about your inbox, so messages will appear to be lost. If you can recover the deleted .plist file, you may also find that your missing messages return to your inbox.

It seems that deleting the preferences is not the first thing to try when your mail screws up!

What type of mail accounts doe you have? Are they POP or IMAP ?
With IMAP the messages are not stored on your computer - they are stored on the server. With POP, you should have a folder for each account under ~/Library/Mail - the messages are not directly under ~/Library/Mail - they are in sub-folders.

Same Problem, Organize by Thread" related w/logs
 

I've been successfully using Apple Mail (v2.0) but if I click on
"Organize by Threads", the applications hangs with CPU accumulating.

Log messages scroll out on console:

2005-08-04 17:35:54.859 Mail[1032] *** -[ConcreteMessageMall compareByNumberMessage:andMessage:sortedAscending:]: selector not recognized [self = 0x4f4fc0]
2005-08-04 17:35:58.715 Mail[1032] *** -[ConcreteMessageMall compareByNumberMessage:andMessage:sortedAscending:]: selector not recognized [self = 0x4f4fc0]
2005-08-04 17:35:58.715 Mail[1032] *** -[ConcreteMessageMall compareByNumberMessage:andMessage:sortedAscending:]: selector not recognized [self = 0x4f4fc0]
2005-08-04 17:36:07.508 Mail[1032] *** -[ConcreteMessageMall compareByNumberMessage:andMessage:sortedAscending:]: selector not recognized [self = 0x4f4fc0]


At this point, the application hangs and if restarted, shows "0 Messages" in Inbox.

Anyone else see this, or did we all give up on Apple Mail...
/John