Mail: Incoming messages problem.

Hiya,
Since around October my Apple Mail has been playing up, when I open Apple mail and click get mail it shows it downloading my mail it gets to around 17/310 message and then the download slowly decreases to 0kb and by the 22nd message it stops downloading mail completely.
I am pretty sure that there are not even 310 messages.
Also if I try and quit mail while it is checking for mail at 0kb it wont quit until I force quit it.
Any suggestions to getting mail to work, I am currently using Thunderbird which I am not getting on with.

Also I am using OSX 10.5.8
and my mac is fully updated.
I have tried removing the mail plist files and that didn't work.
I also tried using pacifist to restore the mail verison for my OSX disk but it said that this version of mail didn't work with this version of the OS so I had to restore it from time machine.

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Mac Mail "Incoming Messages" seems to be in and endless loop.

When I open Mac Mail it automatically stars downloading new incoming mail messages. The indicator bar in the bottom left of the mail window indicates incoming messages 1 of 20. It seems to go for ten minutes or so, then increases to 4 of 58, then increases to 10 of 112, then increases to 14 of 197... This continues endlessly until I eventually have to force quit the application. Seems like something is corrupted in one or several of my many mailboxes I monitor with Mac Mail. What can I do to fix this?

First thing to do is never post your actual email address in the forums; you don't want to get lots of spam as a result of spambots harvesting that address.
Next, login to the web interface of your .mac account and verify how many messages are actually there, both new Unread messages, and already Read messages. Write those numbers down and then logout.
Quit Mail and go to Home/Library/Mail and remove the mailbox for your IMAP (.mac) account. Then delete any files that start with Envelope Index.
Restart Mail and wait for it to download your .mac email again and rebuild your Mail index; then check to see if the problem continues.

Mac mail incoming messages

Occasionally when I click get mail, the incoming messages at bottom left say I'm receiving more than actually show up as new messages. I've already contacted my internet provider and they say I don't have any problems with my mail program. The guy at Apple store couldn't figure it out either. This is a random occurrence so it's difficult to demonstrate at the store. Has anyone experienced this problem?

yeah, mail sometimes seems to do that, but doesn't really matter I guess

Mac Mail incoming messages stuck in endless loop

My Mac Mail (Version 7.3) suddenly went crazy on me this morning - when you check for incoming messages, it will show under mail activity that it is checking but the progress bar will fill 80% of the way then stop, with no messages downloaded. And if you go to check for incoming messages again, the total number of messages will double. On and on like that in an endless loop toward infinity. I was able to see that I do not, in fact, have thousands of e-mails waiting for me by clicking account info -> messages on server. Like a dummy I deleted my account (without backing up my sent and drafts, much to my combined shame and dismay) but that didn't fix the problem. I only have one account, a POP3, in my Mac Mail. OSX version is 10.9.4

First thing to do is never post your actual email address in the forums; you don't want to get lots of spam as a result of spambots harvesting that address.
Next, login to the web interface of your .mac account and verify how many messages are actually there, both new Unread messages, and already Read messages. Write those numbers down and then logout.
Quit Mail and go to Home/Library/Mail and remove the mailbox for your IMAP (.mac) account. Then delete any files that start with Envelope Index.
Restart Mail and wait for it to download your .mac email again and rebuild your Mail index; then check to see if the problem continues.

Apple Mail--incoming messages

Hi... I am setting up a new MacBook Pro and I use Apple Mail just as I did on my old computer... I've imported the mail and tried to set the new one up like it is/was on the old.
But something is different because every five minutes (or at least it seems like every five minutes) when I have Mail setup to check for new mail, I see things like
8 incoming messages
followed a only seconds later by say,
15 incoming messages
But there are no mail messages actually coming in and nor should there be???
Once that message or two gets done, I look around for any new mail and there is none.. I can also immediately click the "check mail" button manually and, as expected, it will get the NO NEW MAIL sound... But then five minues later when it's again time to check mail automatically, more often than not, here comes another barrage of
12 incoming messages
or something silly like that... I thought it might be RSS feed stuff but I can't find any of that set up or running...
It's clearly not real messages coming in, at least nothing I can find... And my old setup on my old computer (also Apple Mail and both old and new are running on 10.8.3, Mail version 6.3) certainly does nothing like that...
So what is it??? What are these phantom incoming messages??
thanks... bob..

Why not just turn off the Gmail "Important" and "All Mail" labels for IMAP access? You can do this in Gmail's Webmail interface (gmail.com), under Settings (the gear icon), in the "Labels" tab. Turn off "Show in IMAP" for those two labels.
Matt

Mail: incoming message text all turned to fractions? What did I do?

Hello,
I'm by no means a power user, but I can take direct instruction well.
My Mail app displays the text of incoming email content as lots of tiny, closely kerned fractions (rather than English).
This came about after I tinkered with some special character settings in a settings panel reached through the GTD app called "Things". There was mention in that application's tutorials of applying special characters to tags. I happily went along in what I thought was a "Things"-specific Character panel - it must have been a system panel. I'm assuming that I inadvertently altered some default language display settings system wide, that affect Mail (and strangely Adobe CS3's Help Application, too).
I went back to "Things" to manually undo whatever I had done, removing a few special characters from the classification of favorites that I had assigned them in that character panel, but to no avail.
Does anyone know of a way to reset language settings that would affect Mail?
I'd go quick to work with any suggestions!
Thank you.

The problem you describe is normally caused by the presence of the font Helvetica Fractions on your machine. It replaces Latin by fractions and is not compatible with OS X. Find it and trash it and your problem should go away.

E72: e-mail and message problem

Hi,
I want to safe up some space on my phone memory so I tried this:
-Menu-messaging-settings-other-change phone memory to memory card.
Now when i try that, for like 2 seconds the phone says "changing message memory in use", then it closes and the menu screen is back open. And when i check back to the setting, the memory use is still on "phone memory"...
-Another thing i did was deleting a lot of e-mails in my hotmail inbox. But when I restarted my phone, they were there again... How do you shorten the amount of emails that are held on the phone?
Thanks in advance,
Thijs

I have no idea about the messages' storage memory, sorry
About your mailbox problem, after you delete emails, you should wait until the next synchronization and do a restart to see if they are there

Mail "newest message" problem

When I select a message in Mail, despite the option of "newest message" being selected in preferences it does not display the newest message. I have to scroll up to the top to see the latest email.

Try rebuilding the mailbox. This can take awhile if you have a lot of mail.
Rebuild mailbox
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Troubleshooting Apple Mail
What does Mail/Window/Connection Doctor Show? If the server is red, select it and look at the Show Details box.
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Yahoo mail inbox message problem in OS X mail

OS X Mail doesn't receive mail from yahoo anymore. I can send mail, see other folders with same account. When I get account info with ctrl+click yahoo inbox, all of the folders have some megabytes, but inbox has 0 bytes altough there are many unread mail in yahoo inbox.

Try rebuilding the mailbox. This can take awhile if you have a lot of mail.
Rebuild mailbox
Mail troubleshooting - Yosemite
Troubleshooting Apple Mail
What does Mail/Window/Connection Doctor Show? If the server is red, select it and look at the Show Details box.
Troubleshooting sending and receiving email messages
SMTP servers keep going offline

Quoting/threading phenomena in mail.app -- due to problems in incoming messages?

Folks:
Mail 5.1 on MacOS 10.7.x
I began using Mail.app when I installed 10.7, shortly after the initial release.
No problems with respect to unformatted email or replying to short, trivial length formatted message. For complex, on-going discussions I feel that consistent and reliable quoting and threading behavior are essential.   But that is not happening in some cases. I'd like to figure out why, and what I might do to fix the issue.
(Note: I do not want to get into a discussion here of formatted versus unformatted email. Both have their pros and cons. Nor do I want to spend a lot of time debating this issue with my correspondents. As a matter of courtesy, I set Mail.app to respond using the same message format as the original message.)
When I reply to a formatted email, I notice that mail.app sometimes draws a dark grey box --with rounded corners-- around one or more incoming paragraphs, placing a circled "X" "close icon" at the upper left.   I don't get it. To what does this correspond? Why does mail.app mark-off this text and offer a "close icon"?   As far as I know I'm not doing anything that implies I might want to delete the text.
(Note: Rummaging around in the corresponding message source, it seems that these boxes correspond to blockquoted text in the received message.)
Editing within one of these boxes is really unpredictable. Sometimes I can select an insertion point and insert a line-break, in preparation of replying to the text just above. Sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes I can select text, and cut it. Sometimes nothing happens at all to the selected text.
Mail.app commonly doesn't correctly increase the quoting level in such paragraphs. Using
    Format> Quote Level>Increase
to maintain threading history manually is fairly easy since I've defined a function-key shortcut, which works some of the time -- but the effect of this command is unpredictable. Sometimes this command deletes the selected text entirely. (Grrrrrr!) The workaround I've found is to select smaller chunks of text. In such cases, this command generally works correctly.
Meanwhile, messages from exactly one person --who uses gmail exclusively-- are displayed in a completely unique threaded format by mail.app. The entire short history of 5 messages from him are displayed on multiple virtual sheets in one message window, with the latest first.    In one view, clicking on the "see more" link at the bottom of his messages unleashes a cool-looking accordion opening effect and displays my part of the thread. (I guess. I don't totally understand this display concept. But it looks very cool and seems to handle quoting and threading pretty well.)
What's going on?
My best guess is that mail.app is struggling with "inconsistencies" in the incoming messages from different people using various email clients. I seem to recall reading that email tech specs are a hodgepodge of evolving and contradictory standards. Is that correct?   Is that the root of my issue?
Many of my correspondents are non-tekkies and/or non-affluent, and they use whatever email client they can afford. Some could be using really old email clients. That doesn't help, right? Are blockquotes a really archaic formatting measure?
When these problems occur, they can cost me a lot of time and trouble. It's really distracting to have to deal with portions of the incoming message disappear.
I don't think it is practical to persuade my correspondents to upgrade their email clients. Some of them have trouble simply setting the preferences to support quoting.   Threading is a difficult concept for a few.
Any suggestions?   Any mail.app preference settings I might try adjusting? Any add-ins?   Is it possible to tell Mail.app "interpret all incoming blockquotes tags as simple breaks" or strip them entirely? Or ...?
TIA

haavee:
Thanks for your reply on this thread.
And thanks for the confirmation: Yes, often difficult, and completely unworkable in some cases.
To my surprise, I've been able to find very few people reporting similiar observations. Very little about this issue at all on the web.
I looked for command-key variations on Format --> Make Plain Text, hoping for a block action, but none I tried was any different.
Here is my current view of the issue:
• For formatted messages, each email client operates differently. If there is a standard it seems to be no more robust than "use simple HTML for formatted messages".
• The "can't insert" issue, as well as those mysterious rectangle-surrounded blocks, seems very correlated with the presence of html <div> sections in the message. It is awkward to experiment, so I've only done a limited amount. My observations so far:
-- I don't think you can insert text anywhere "inside" a <div>, and mail.app seems to treat <div> as a "sticky" attribute -- e.g/ very difficult/impossible to remove without deleting the text inside. The copy-style method doesn't seem to affect <div> tags.
-- Based on one case, it appears that message bodies composed of back-to-back <div> sections are impervious to inserts anywhere. (The email client used by one particular person with whom I've corresponded seems to build messages out of --you guessed it-- back-to-back <div> sections. Putting on my HTML coders hat -- I cannot see any sense at all in doing this. Smells to me like a kludge/hack, as you prefer.)
• What about an applicable mail.app add-in? I can find mail.app add-ins, but it seems the mail.app tech info (API) isn't public, so those that exist are based on guesswork about how it works. This means that add-ins must be re-tooled possibly for each new version of mail.app. Altogether, not encouraging for add-in developers. And, yes, consistent with that the range of functionality I've seen is rather limited. So, I've given up looking in the add-in category.
• Applescript has commands for controlling mail.app generally, but I didn't see anything approaching the level of function necessary to remove <divs> by global search-and-replace. (I'm far from an Applescript expert, so it is very possible I missed something.) Nor did I see any general command such as Clean up dodgy HTML in message. (I can dream!)
The only bit of progress I've had is finding TextSoap: http://www.unmarked.com/textsoap/ which may have promise. But I have had no time to evaluate it and it may be a month or so before I get a chance to check it out.
Looking at the upper right of the window in which I'm composing this message, there's a button "HTML" that lets me see --and edit-- the underlying HTML. On first glance, there's not enough functionality to, say, efficiently clean up all insert-resistant blocks in a message, but it looks practical to clean up individual blocks, and maybe that's all it would take.    Though I imagine that the user base for these forums is not very different from that of mail.app, I'm guessing adding this function to mail.app isn't even a dim possibity. Oh, well...
I note you are happy with your solution, so I'll try see if a variation of it might help me.
Thanks,
h.2

Apple Mail 250 MILLION incoming messages (Mavericks)

A few weeks ago I upgraded to Mavericks.
Mail was working great but now I'm having all kinds of problems.
I've seen there are lots of other people having similar problems, but one I have not seen anyone post is...
In the "mail activity" window, below the list of mailboxes, I have a HUGE number of incoming messages.
Today it is up to over 250 MILLION incoming messages!!!!! Not hundred, not thousand but MILLION And the number is still increasing!!
In my different emails I may get a maximum (depending on the day) of up to 150 emails, all of which are already loaded on my computer (I end up deleting the majority of those emails), so how can I have so many emails trying to come in??
Of course, when I open my Activity Monitor, the Mail application sometimes takes up OVER 100% of the processor... making it impossible to work.
I went into my different accounts and deleted the "deleted" emails on the servers. What else can I do?
What can possibly be causing this??
I have several gmail accounts and others on specific domains (linked to websites), all imap.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!
macbook pro 15-inch, Early 2011,
mavericks 10.9.5
8 go ram
Mail 7.3

Yes Eric that does reset it but the numbers quickly start to climb again!!!
At first it says may 10 incoming messages (that would be about normal), but now I'm up to over 50,000 again!!!
There is some sort of duplication going on that was not happening before I upgraded to Mavericks.
I agree with you about feedback. I'm trying to send feedback everyday, until I find a solution.
This problem is keeping me from working since it is using up way too much of the CPU.
Thanks anyway.

Messages received before september 4th are not more readable. However , not problem of reading for incoming messages for yesterday and today. How can I recover old messages ??ges dated

Hi , All my incoming messages up to September 4th on one of my mail accounts are impossible to be read again !! When I 'click" on any of the messages a blank window appears instead of the text..!! However , all the incoming messages received yesterday and today are perfectly readable.
How can I solve this problem ?
Sorry for my poor English..Thanks in advance
Francois

Hi Francois, nothing wrong with your English at all!
Not certain, but this can fix myriad Mail problems...
Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), it will try to repair your Disk Directory while the spinning radian is happening, so let it go, run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, then move this folder & file to the Desktop.
Move this Folder to the Desktop...
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Caches/Mail/
Move this file to the Desktop...
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail/Envelope Index
Reboot.
If that doesn't do it and you can afford to redo all your Rules, try these & reboot...
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist.backup

My mail activity shows more than 1 million incoming messages and is moving in lots of 10 thousand - this is happening periodically - what is wrong?

Ever since I upgraded to Mavericks my mail has been periodically showing incoming messages at larger and larger volumes. Sometimes in the hundreds of thousands and today in the millions. Clearly I don't have that going on - it seems to eat my resources for a bit and then stops - I have no idea what is going on. Suggestions?

It is a bug. Quit Mail and then reopen it. Should fix it.
Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.
Mail/Provide Mail Feedback

Apple Mail Infinite Incoming Messages

I have 9 email accounts setup in Apple Mail. They all worked on various Macs and iOS devices until the recent upgrades to iOS7 and Mavericks. On my Macs, all with Mavericks via a completely clean install, I am having the following issues:
* Mail using excessive (> 100% CPU on multi core machines) CPU as long as it is open
* "Mail Activity" shows an ever growning number of "Incoming Messages"
* Settings are not being remembered.
I have tried the following:
* Delete ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail
* Delete ~/Library/Mail
* Remove ALL accounts from Mail and "Internet Accounts"
* Rebooting
* Relaunching Mail
* Disabling accounts
* Pretty much every combination of the above
Nothing seems to work. The disappearing settings may be the result of trying many different combinations of the above methods and forgetting when I deleted them specifically but I am sure that they have disappeared at least once without that having been the case.

CT - The problem is certainly not the standard behaviour so it is unsurprising that everyone cannot reproduce it. I did a new clean install after an upgrade some time ago and everything magically worked. I tried to list all the possibly relevant criteria in my original post but it is clearly not the whole story as I am no longer experiencing the problem
RedRacer123 - It is not a virus. It is just talk back and forth between your server and client (Mail). Especially with Gmail accounts there are a bunch of messages that are synced and archived behind the scenes which do not get displayed as new and unread (e.g. spam, chats). Regardless the problem I experienced and the problem that Megan62 is experiencing is different than just being unrelated: the count just rises and one can see that Mail is using a bunch of CPU doing something but it doesn't ever seem to finish whatever that is. I get a lot of mail but I do not have 250 MILLION messages when I see a counter go that high it is a bug in some while loop.
Megan62 - Sorry I don't have any advice other than try removing all your accounts email accounts from the computer and adding them back one by one. Hopefully whatever happened to cause the error will not happen again. I also think it might help to move as many emails out of your inbox as possible but I am not certain on that.

My mac mail tells me there are 168 incoming messages but then only receives six

My mac mail tells me there are 168 incoming messages but then only receives six
I'm using the latest version of mail but not very good in dealing with computer problems. My email supplier is Bt Internet.
Can anyone help

I have seen something similar once. A message on the mail server was corrupted and the download would never complete, but would always start the next time I launched Mail. It was the oldest message, so Mail always started with it, blocking all other mail. Deleting the file on the server was the solution. Don't know if that fits your situation. Good luck. BTW, I called my ISP's tech support and they watched the server's actions and could see that the file was not actually transferring. Give yours a call.

Mail: Incoming messages problem.

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