Envelope Index Headache

Question

I have had several weeks of total frustration with Mail downloading all the contents of my server every night. A variety of techniques have been kindly suggested and tried in order to persuade Mail to stop doing this, sadly without success. Today my ISP suggested pulling Envelope Index out of Home>Library>Mail and onto the desktop, forcing Mail to create a new Envelope Index which would import my old messages and restore order. The only problem is that the import gets to 3504 of my 79658 messages and hangs. I ran a full Verify Disk and Repair Disk Permissions before I began, using my Installation Disk. So now I have no emails in my folders, and an application I can't use. I also note from other discussions that once you remove the old Envelope Index file to the desktop it becomes useless. Thankfully I copied my Mail Folder before I began, so all is not totally lost, but I would appreciate any suggestions on how I persuade Mail to do the full import, or how I can isolate file 3504 and bypass it during the import process.....Greg
Imac 2 GHz Intel Core Duo   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

You’re welcome.
Not sure what you mean. You’ve continued using Mail in such a bad state instead of restoring the ~/Library/Mail folder? Also, if the messages are still on the server (and they have to be for you to have the original problem), Mail would download them again. And, as long as you don’t delete anything while trying to solve the problem, you could just import the new messages back into Mail after swapping Mail folders...
That said, if you want to try to fix the problem in place, you may try quitting Mail, moving the problematic mailboxes out of ~/Library/Mail/, re-create Envelope Index again, and try to import those mailboxes back into Mail afterwards.