Email disappearing after rebuilding mailbox

I rebuilt a mailbox that had about 200 messages in it, and over 1/2 disappeared.
This was not because of upgrading from 10.3, I've been running 10.4 since it came out and have all the updates installed.
This is not one of my Inboxes, but a local mailbox that I created for sorting/storing messages.
I can go to Library->Mail->Mailbox->Messages folder and see all the messages there. If I double click one, I can view the message.
I've searched the forums here and tried the following that has been suggested for similar problems, but it hasn't worked:
1. Repair permissions w/ Disk Utility
2. Pull the mailbox itself to the desktop & import again (several times, after re-trying other points listed here).
3. Delete the Envelope Index & allow mail to import on it's own. (I didn't see an Envelope Journal).
4. View the permissions of a message in the folder that I can't import vs. one that I can view. They are exact.
5. Rebuild the mailbox from within mail.
The only thing I haven't done is completely reinstall Mail or delete the Library->Preferences->Mail plist. Mainly b/c I've got a lot of email addresses that I monitor, and that would be a major pain, that I don't want to undertake if there's any other option available.
What else do I need to try to get these messages back in?
Thanks!
Chris
Mac OS X (10.4.7)

OPEN LETTER TO THE MAIL 2.0 CODING TEAM. RSVP.
with thanks to DAVID GIMENO GOST, for answering so many people's posts about all the mail 2.0 bugs.
hi guys,
i love all things apple, and i have done for twenty years.
but with respect, your build of mail 2.0 really could be a lot better.
moving my mail from 1.0 on an ibook g3 running os X 10.3.9, over to mail 2.0 on an intel macbook 1.83 running os X 10.4.7 has been a nightmare.
the discussion boards of many mac sites feature countless cases of people making the move from 1.0 to 2.0, with all their e-mails disappearing.
having spent two weeks reading the knowledge forums, and learning about emailchemy, plus all the complications which, even with that third party program, still exist in moving one's mail over from version 1.0 over to 2.0, are both massive and horrendous.
and that's for me, who has twenty years of finding my way around mac bugs.
but this one is the most difficult i've ever seen, as well as being one of the most widespread problems in a FULL VERSION RELEASE of an apple program, which apple has done nothing to resolve during the six months in which this problem has been widespread in the mac community worldwide.
so thank god for DAVID GIMENO GOST !
i'm amazed that apple still hasn't come up with a patch for moving mail from 1.0 to 2.0.
even now, while i've finally got all my mail back today, 95% is showing as unread, due to the last obstacles in the process, which i can no longer face solving.
i've also lost hundreds of red mail flags during the transfer :o(.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, guys:
we shouldn't need to be buying third party software to move our e-mails from apple mail 1.0 up to apple mail 2.0, and even then be faced by massive hurdles to overcome, which take weeks for someone who at least has SOME idea of what he's doing.
i pity all the people who read the numerous forum posts about how difficult it is to transfer their mail from 1.0 to 2.0, and simply give up on the spot, and have to start their e-mail history TODAY, unable to access their previous e-mail again - potentially now for ever.
because the ironic joke is that we can't even have an access copy of mail 1.0 on our macs to read our old e-mails, unless we hack that program out of the 10.3 cd installation set, which the gurus on your own web site recommend us NOT to do !
so what are we supposed to do, to access our old e-mail, which we can't open, even though YES, it is in our mail folder, and YES, we did full rebuilds of every mail folder, and YES, we trashed our mail preferences first.
e-mail is now at the very center of the average mac user's digital life.
a user's most important program should not require countless hours scrolling through the astonishing number of problems within mail 2.0, which the apple.com discussion boards evidence, with new problems being added every day.
please sort this out, and build a patch, for the sanity of the many people who love apple, but who are unable to access any of their old e-mails.
because i wouldn't wish the last fortnight on anyone else.
RSVP, APPLE.
with best wishes to everyone on the infinity loop,
michael thorne
london, england
[email protected]
ps: if you're a mac user who has been affected by the mail 2.0 disappearing bug, please post a reply to this message, and send me an e-mail to: [email protected], so that we can draw apple's increasing attention to it. thanks.
MacBook1. 1.83 GHz. 512 MB. Mac OS X (10.4.7)

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Sent emails disappeared after rebuild

When I try to view sent mail from one of my accounts in Mail, I've been seeing "The message xxx concerning “xxx” has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it." Checked the size of the box and it was at 1.1 GB, so I deleted a bunch of emails with attachments, but that didn't help after re-opening the application. Following the advice of a post here, I tried to rebuild that mailbox, and the emails all vanished. Tried finding them in Home/Library/Mail/SentMessages.mbox, but the sent mail files there are very small (20 KB), nowhere near the 400MB I was at when the emails disappeared.
I also discovered that there are two, near-duplicate folders for this account in the Mail folder: one contains a trailing space after the name; dates created 3/25/2005 and 1/18/2006, both last modified today. I'm using POP on OS 10.3.9 and have tried re-importing the mailbox, but got nothing. I still get the message about downloading the message from he server when I try to view Sent emails from this account....
Can anybody help me get those sent emails back in their folder? Thanks in advance--

What appears below is what I would have posted if it wasn’t because of the weird duplicate account folder you mention. You may be able to figure out which of the two account folders is Mail using to store your mail by looking at the modification dates of the mailboxes it contains rather than the modification dates of the account folders themselves...
<hr>
It looks like you have the problem described in the following article:
Overstuffed mailbox is unexpectedly empty
As you can see, letting a mailbox grow indefinitely is a really bad idea — and it appears to be too late now to solve the problem doing what the article suggests. If this is a POP account, you may be able to fix it as follows:
1. Quit Mail if it’s running.
2. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Mail/POP-username@mailserver/.
3. Locate Sent Messages.mbox and move it to the Desktop.
4. Open Mail. A new empty Sent Messages.mbox will automatically be created within the account folder, and this will allow you to continue using Mail normally while trying to solve the problem.
Although Sent Messages.mbox appears to be a file, it’s actually a special kind of folder (a package) that contains several files. Ctrl-click on Sent Messages.mbox and choose Show Package Contents from the contextual menu to see the files it contains. Of these files, mbox is the most important and is where all your messages are stored. What’s the size of that file? Depending on its size, you may or may not be able to directly import it back into Mail in the next step.
An Incoming_Mail file may also be present, in which case it might contain messages that Mail couldn’t transfer to mbox. Incoming_Mail is also a standard mbox file like mbox proper, just named differently, and can be imported back into Mail in the same way.
5. In Mail, do File > Import Mailboxes and follow the instructions to import the Sent Messages.mbox that’s on the Desktop. I’m not sure what the import options available in Mail 1.x are, but you should choose Other / Standard mbox or something like that, so that Mail looks at the mbox file only (and Incoming_Mail, if present) and ignores the other files in the package.
If Mail doesn’t let you select Sent Messages.mbox in step 5 because it’s a package instead of a plain folder, rename Sent Messages.mbox to just Sent Messages (i.e. remove the .mbox suffix) so that it becomes a normal folder, and try again. You cannot do this directly in the Finder because removing a suffix by normal means causes the Finder to hide the suffix instead of renaming the file. To remove the suffix from the name, you must do File > Get Info (⌘I) on the file and change the name there.
If the mbox file is too big for Mail to handle it, however, you’ll have to break it into smaller pieces. You can do that with an MBOX Breaker Script available at Allan Sampson’s website, or with Emailchemy. The former will ignore the Incoming_Mail file that I mentioned previously, but you may try importing that file directly if it’s not too big or just ignore it if all your messages are in mbox. Also, if you removed the .mbox suffix from the name of the mailbox, you may need to add it back again for the script to recognize it.
If all is well and you don’t miss anything, the files on the Desktop can be deleted, although you may want to keep them for a while, just in case.
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder. That is, ~/Library is the Library folder within the user’s home folder, i.e. /Users/username/Library.

Messages disappeared after rebuilding mailbox in Apple Mail

I had a lot of messages in my mailbox (over 20,000). During rebuild of the inbox, the program froze after a while, so I had to force quit the application. Now all of my messages after June 2006 (about 17,000) are missing. Is there any way to get these messages back to my inbox?
I did backup of the whole system about a month ago, but I would like to resolve this somehow else as I received a lot of important stuff over last month.

First, in the Finder, open Home/Library/Mail/this mailbox (if the Inbox, then it will be in the account folder for that account, if an On My Mac mailbox you created it will be in the Mailboxes folder). Open this xxxx.mbox folder, find the Messages folder, open it, and report the number of files said to be in this Messages folder?
Are you sure it froze? How long did you wait? It is normal for all messages in the list of messages to temporarily disappear during Rebuild.
More info, please, including whether using POP, IMAP or .mac if this is the Inbox.
Ernie

Email disappears after dragging from inbox to subfolder.

Email disappears after dragging from inbox to subfolder. It is not lost because if it is unread it shows as an unread email in the sub folder. When I set the folder to view # of emails the # of emails shows next to the folder, but the actual emails do not.Also
if the email that is moved to a subfolder has not been read it will show an unread email in the subfolder but still not be able to view the actual email.
This does not happen on all subfolders.

Tried resetting the view on that folder already? You can do this via the View tab.
Otherwise, you'll have to share more details like at least your version of Outlook and type of email account.
Robert Sparnaaij
[MVP-Outlook]
Outlook guides and more: HowTo-Outlook.com
Outlook Quick Tips: MSOutlook.info

Revover emails after rebuild mailbox

I have run rebuild for my mailbox and lost all my emails.
After an extended research in web I found out that I should spot the INBOX.mbox file and retrieve mails from it.
Although I found it, it was only 7.1MB. I had over 5.000 mails in my inbox, so probably the emails were also erased from INBOX.mbox.
I have no backups. Is there anything I can do?
Thank you in advance.

Depends who your email provider is. For example if you are using Google Mail you would use your browser to go to google.com then log into your email account. The emails will be listed there if you had google mail set up as IMAP. You would then set up your google account in your email client again and your email will be available in your client again. Of course this all depends on how you had set up your email account in the first place.

Emails disappearing from shared mailbox

Hi
Mixed environment of 2007/10/13 with Exchange 2010
No autoarchiving and no rules on clients or server
The emails are coming in, but they disappear after they have been moved to the folder
I am out of ideas
Thanks
Chris

The emails are coming in, but they disappear after they have been moved to the folder
So you have sort of rules to organize your mails by moving them to different folders? Does this happen to all clients?
As suggested by DJ above, please check your view/filter settings first:
Outlook 2007
Reset view; View-> Current View-> Customize Current View…-> button Reset Current View
Outlook 2010/2013
Reset view; tab View-> button Reset View
Please have a try and feel free to post back with any findings.
Regards,
Ethan Hua
TechNet Community Support
It's recommended to download and install
Configuration Analyzer Tool (OffCAT), which is developed by Microsoft Support teams. Once the tool is installed, you can run it at any time to scan for hundreds of known issues in Office
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Photo disappear after rebuilding library

Hi all,
It's very sad thing to happen on x'mas.. hope i can get some help here.
I don't know what cause the problem... so i'd better describe everything i've done.
My friend sent me some photos in his iphone to my email.
I then saved all those photos on my iphone.
I've checked them on camera roll after downloading..and it still works.
then i load the app "Polarize", and try to load the photos from camera roll.
Then it said there's no photos..
so then i went back to photo... it then started to "updating library" / rebuilding library...
then i waited... after rebuild...several hundreds of photos are gone...
I tried to restart...and they are still gone...
Since my laptop has taken to maintenance, it hasn't been backed up for a while now...
Please kindly suggest any solution...

Make a temporary, backup copy (if you don't already have a backup copy) of the library and try the following:
1 - delete the iPhoto preference file, com.apple.iPhoto.plist, that resides in your
User/Home()/Library/ Preferences folder.
2 - delete iPhoto's cache file, Cache.db, that is located in your
User/Home()/Library/Caches/com.apple.iPhoto folder.
3 - launch iPhoto and try again.
NOTE: If you're moved your library from its default location in your Home/Pictures folder you will have to point iPhoto to its new location when you next open iPhoto by holding down the Option key when launching iPhoto. You'll also have to reset the iPhoto's various preferences.
OT

My iMac drops settings information. Sounds associated with receiving and sending an email disappear after about a week and return following a restart after a shutdown. Also my picture taken, which was taken about a year ago, recently disappeared.

My iMac drops settings information. Sounds associated with receiving and sending an email disppear after about a week and return following a shutdown and a restart. The cycle contunes. Also, the picture of me that was taken when I bought the iMac more than a year ago and appeared at logon recently disappeared and was replaced by a soccer ball. I took a new picture, which appeared for about a week at logon, and it has now been replace by a blank picture.

The standard procedure with these types of isues is a PRAM reset.
Shut down your Mac.
Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command (⌘), Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
Turn on the computer.
Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys before the gray screen appears.
Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
Release the keys.
Excerpt from http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

IPhone Email Disappears After I Download Email to Outlook on my Laptop

Can anyone help me with the iPhone issue I am having?
When my laptop is shutdown, I can see and access email on my iPhone. But, the email on iPhone disappears after I download the email to Outlook on my laptop.

It sounds like you have a POP account, which is designed for accessing from one computer.
An IMAP account allows for access from many computers/clients.

Lost email messages after rebuild

This all started when I was trying to help my friend setup a rule for moving messages to and from specific people to a specific folder. Worked all well, but for some reason bunches of old messages started showing the "not downloaded from server" error. So, per Apple and this discussion boards advice I "rebuilt" all of the mailboxes. This fixed the not downloaded issue, but any messages older than one week are now missing from the inbox and sent mail folders. I tried all of the advised techniques...reran rebuild and deleted envelope index file and imported mailboxes...nothing worked. I tried looking at the .emlx files as well and there aren't any older than one week in the inbox or sentbox folders. My friend is (justifiably) freaking out. Any NEW advice? I was thinking of running DataRescue or DiskWarrior to see if I could recover and deleted or missing .emlx files.
System is a PowerMac G5 1.8ghz, Mac OS 10.4.10, Mail 2.1. Also, none of the mailboxes is even close to approaching mails MB limits. Email account is a POP account and has been setup for at least a few years.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Message was edited by: pixelnyc
Message was edited by: pixelnyc

Have you tried searching for the missing messages in Spotlight (not in Mail)?
If the .emlx files aren’t there, rebuilding mailboxes or re-creating the index isn’t going to make them reappear. If the messages are not on the server either and you don’t have a backup, you may want to try to salvage as many deleted .emlx files as possible with a data recovery tool such as Data Rescue II or FileSalvage. Of these, the only one I know for sure that can currently recover deleted .emlx files is FileSalvage. Stop using the computer right now if you want to try that, as anything you do with it may cause the deleted files to be overwritten.

IPhone 5 - IMAP emails disappear after 1 read, but still present in outlook.

Hi,
I have a client who is experiencing a weird issue. They have 3 email accounts on their iphone 5 all with the same @blankdomain.com IMAP address. Only 1 of these accounts is having this issue, the others are set up the same, but do not experience it.
It receives and sends fine from that account, but after an email is read, the email disappears off the device. It is still present in the inbox in Outlook on thier PC, but very inconvenient it does not remain on the device.
Right now I have suggested taking a screen shot of the email once opened so they can later reference it, but also clearly not ideal.
Any idea's what might be causing this? Or troubleshooting steps to try?
Thanks!
(sorry if this thread is out there already, I searched and found similar threads but not exactly what I was looking for)

Does anyone from apple ever read these questions, or are questions the community doesn't know anything about just left here to rot lol?

HELP! my emails disappeared after I modified the pop incoming and outgoing server settings in my apple mail email account. I have checked all my mailboxes--gone. How could they have disappeared? I am talking about 200 plus business emails

I have checked all my mailboxes--gone. How could they have disappeared? I am talking about 200 plus business emails. I am using Lion X.0

Thomas,
"Note that you were warned that this would happen and approved it. When you delete an e-mail account in Mail, you are shown a message like the following:"
You didn't read my problem - I said I deleted a POP email account. I always read the messages that pop up and in Mail when you delete a POP account - IT DOESN'T TELL YOU NUTHIN! It just deletes it - which *** for me. Fortunately, I had an iPhone and on that device I had about a 1000 messages that I could recover but on all my POP accounts I download them from the server onto my Mac so they were only on Mail (the really old ones that I wanted to keep.) I had to move them into another directory one by one basically because when I would move 50 some of them would move and some wouldn't and I never did figure out that problem. Basically the ones that would not move are the ones that were associated with my domain changes with GoDaddy, and there were a lot of those. Have no idea as to why only those were resistant to moving but I can get all that data from GoDaddy anyway.
This thread is now moot seeing as how I've recovered everything I can and am going to just move on - and back up more often. ;-)
Apple and Mail need to rewrite that program to include a WARNING MESSAGE when deleting an Account in Mail that says ALL YOUR MESSAGES ARE GOING TO DISAPPEAR NEVER TO RETURN IF YOU DELETE THIS ACCOUNT, SO YOU DANG WELL BETTER HAVE A BACK UP IF YOU WANT TO KEEP ANYTHING BEFORE PRESSING THAT MINUS SYMBOL! ;-)

Messages lost after rebuilding mailbox

Inbox had a message that said it was damaged --rebuilt as suggested and then each message in it said that it had not yet been downloaded from the server. Tried rebuilding it again and now all of the messages are gone. Then tried importing inbox.mbox which produced a selection of email that did not resemble the original inbox.
Are my original inbox messages retreivable?

No, it isn't clear. I still don't know what does "I attempted to import files from it (unsuccessfully)" mean, nor what does "I then tried to reconstruct the inbox from the mac back up" mean. These statements are too vague.
The only items within an *.mbox folder used by Mail 2.x are Info.plist and the Messages folder. Any other files you may see there are almost certainly Mail 1.x files that Mail 2.x leaves there after the conversion. This is poorly explained in Mac OS X 10.4 Mail: Some mailbox files used by Mac OS X 10.3 are not deleted after importing. The article only talks about mailboxes in ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/, but the same could also be said about mailboxes in any of the "POP-" account folders.
As long as you keep a backup copy of the old files for a while (at least, until you're sure everything was converted properly), they can safely be removed from the Mail folder. OnyX has a Cleaning > Misc Options > Temporary and obsolete items option for getting rid of all those files.
Note that if you see strangely-named Messages-T0x... folders, these aren't old files from previous versions of Mail, but rather an indication that there is something amiss. More specifically, these are temporary folders created by Mail 2.x during an import or a reindexing process (e.g. rebuilding a mailbox) that Mail should have deleted when done. Their presence is a clear indication that something didn't work as expected.
Importing a mailbox that still has the old files there would produce different results depending on how you try to import it. Importing it as Other, for example, would cause Mail to look at the old mbox file only, ignoring everything else, which almost certainly is not what you want.
In order to import the current mailbox contents, you must first move all the *.emlx files out of the Messages-T0x... folders and into Messages proper, then get rid of the (now empty) Messages-T0x... folders. In Mail, do File > Import Mailboxes, choose Mail for Mac OS X as the data format, and follow the instructions. Note that Mail wants you to select the folder that contains the mailbox to be imported, not the *.mbox folder itself.

Incoming email disappears after opening.

Does anyone know why new incoming emails in .mac account would disappear right after opening? I have searched my entire mailbox looking for them and I have to ask the sender to resend. This is not for all new incoming emails, it is sporadic.

There are some good ideas being tossed around here, and I'm sure everyone would agree that if it's a problem with the Yahoo! mail client or some type of security issue when receiving/viewing emails on multiple devices, the mail provider should be informed of the issue. I found an outside resource on the Yahoo! site while researching the issue (How to report a problem). This method informs the mail provider of trends and perhaps they can make adjustments to help rectify these issues.
From what it sounds like, the issue is specific to Yahoo! and should be troubleshot, tested, adjusted, and escalated to the mail host. Perhaps there are settings that can be adjusted on the account for optimal performance on the device.
Some other things to try:
1) Try to download a different mail retrieval client from the Market (just type email in the search box, and you'll get plenty of hits).
2) Try downloading the Yahoo! mail app from the Market to see if the errors persist there.
3) Ensure mail retrieval clients accessing the same account do not interfere with the email setup on your Android device. This
mainly happens when desktop/pc software accesses the same email account as the Android device.
Please reply with any new info, troubleshooting steps, or breaking news regarding this email situation.

Outlook 2007 Search emails disappear after single-click

Greetings,
I have at least two users that have a peculiar problem. For each, when they perform a search of their emails via Outlook 2007 (against Exchange 2010) and receive the results, upon clicking on some emails, the email clicked on will disappear from the search
results instantly. There is almost no time for the user to read the email after selecting it from the search results because it disappears so fast. These are not unread emails and it doesn't happen to all emails they click on within the search results so I
am leaning away from there being a filter applied.
If they re-run the search, the emails show back up again so it doesn't appear that they are truly deleted in any way. The users are not using Cached Exchange Mode.
Again, this is only happening for emails that show up as a result of a search, not in the users' regular inbox or other folders.
Thanks!

Hi,
It doesn't sound like an expected experience in Outlook and I didn't reproduce it. Just confirm, are the users using Instant Search or Advanced Find? Please also confirm if the same problem persists on OWA.
I doubt if it's caused by any 3rd-party add-ins, we can start Outlook in Safe Mode:
Press Win + R and type “outlook.exe /safe” in the blank box, then press Enter.
If there’s no problem when searching in Safe Mode, disable the suspicious add-ins to verify which add-ins caused this issue.
We can also have the users start Outlook with the switch "/cleanviews", this will reset all custom views and change back to the default view, test if this helps.
Regards,
Melon Chen
TechNet Community Support

Email disappearing after rebuilding mailbox

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