Imap emails disappear

I have two IMAP email accounts. One appears to work properly. The other one shows and email only once and then it disappears. It shows that there are emails in the inbox- once you view the email, it disappears. It shows that there are emails still there, but I can't access them.
I looked in the library for this email and see that I have an "Inbox.imapmbox" folder (contains one "message" folder and one "plist" folder) and separate Inbox folder that contains "drafts.imapmbox", "sentmessage.imapmbox" among other folders but it does not include an "inbox.imapbox" folder.
Any idea what the issue might be?

Disregard. Rebuild fixed the issue. Duh.

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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?

IMAP emails disappearing from Snow Leopard Mail Server

I run IT for a publishing company with about 75 IMAP accounts on my 10.6.8 Snow Leopard Server running mail services. I received a call two days ago from a user claiming that his 7000 mails have vanished from his mail application. When I checked his account through webmail all his emails were gone yet none were in the deleted mail mailbox. Being daring I went into my backups and copied all of the that user's email for the following location from the server backup /private/var/spool/imap/dovecot/mail. Once I put the mail back everything seemed great but shortly after the emails began disappearing again. At a rate of about 100 every few minutes. Not much later all 7000 emails were gone again. I repeated this procedure several times with the same result. I since have had him access as a POP account so that as a temporary fix the email would reside on his Mac and not vanish. But I still can't figure out why this is happening. Any ideas or thoughts would be extremely appreciated.
Thanks,
Tom Beausoleil

Did you find a solution to this issue? My mail server is doing the same thing. I've tried six migrations now, and have a couple of tickets open, but they all have issues. I have worked around all of them except the mail server problem.
I did some more digging; the problem appears to be that on a migrated server, it leaves all of your mail store in the old location, doesn't move it, and then doesn't appear to upgrade spam-assassin properly. The net effect is that the mail server gets the SMTP communication, tries to pass the message into spam assassin, and then it goes south.
I see errors like this littered in the logs:
Jul 31 13:53:10 mail org.amavis.amavisd[5927]: bayes: cannot open bayes databases /var/amavis/.spamassassin/bayes_* R/O: tie failed:
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Do you see anything similar?

IMAP Emails Disappear from Box

Sometimes, i seem to touch something at the top left of my sent mailbox and it collapses and all the emails from that day (usually the most recent/today) disappear. I can't seem to get them back. I can collapse and un-collapse emails from prior dates/weeks,
but these emails seem to disappear into vapor, and then I can't find them?
I'm using Office 2013. Any ideas/suggestions?

Hi,
Can you see the missing emails from web access?
If the emails are still available from web access, please try the following steps to check the result:
1. Logon your email account through Web-based Access.
2. Create a new subfolder under inbox and move all of messages in inbox to the new one. (Perform the same steps if you have other folder)
3. Move the messages back to the original Inbox folder.
4. On the client site, please create a new Outlook profile and resetup your mail account:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/829918
5. Sync your account again to check if the issue still persists.
If you can’t see the missing emails from web access, please check if you can find them in your
Deleted Items folder. You can also do an instant search within
All Mailboxes to check if you can find the missing items.
In addition, please start Outlook in safe mode to check if this issue was caused by any problematic add-ins. Press Windows key + R, type
outlook.exe /safe in the Run dialog and press Enter.
Lastly, we can start Outlook with /cleanviews and /resetfolders switches to check if the problem is related to corrupted view. To do this, press Windows key + R, type
outlook.exe /cleanviews in the Run dialog and press Enter. If /cleanviews not solve the problem, then try /resetfolders switch in the same way.
Please let me know the result.
Regards,
Steve Fan
TechNet Community Support

IMAP Mac Email disappearing & Reappearing

I am on OSX 10.8.3 using Mac Mail 6.3. I have made sure allof my siftware is up to date. I set up my email to use IMAP not POP. It has been working great for a while but now my email disappears and reappears. I had like 50 unread messages and now it says I have eight. I checked my mail server and I have 50 on the server. Also, even though my email says I have 8 unread, when I go to my inbox, it is empty. Then, all of a sudden, they will reappear. I have run the synchornize command and according to the Activity screen it just runs and runs. So then after they reappear, I can read my emails, etc. like normal. Then all of a sudden it starts all over again.
Any thoughts/ideas as to why I am seeing this weird behavior?
Thanks,
Clay

What sort of regular maintenance? No such maintenance is required. You don't have any of that "clean up" software do you?
I wrote a little diagnostic program to help show what might be causing these problems. Download EtreCheck from http://www.etresoft.com/download/EtreCheck.zip, run it, and paste the results here.
Disclaimer: Although EtreCheck is free, there are other links on my site that could give me some form of compensation, financial or otherwise.

Some (not all) emails disappearing / deleting themselves from folders in the Mail app on iPhone 4S

I am having an issue with some of my emails disappearing on my iPhone 4S and I am wondering if anyone else is experiencing similar issues and might offer a solution? I have three email accounts on my iPhone 4S and iPad 2 (of which include my iCloud @mac.com and Yahoo!) and all are set up as IMAP so that I can be sure both devices remain in sync at all times. The issue occurs when I go into any of my archive email folders, in any one of my three email accounts and let the iPhone sync with the server so that it is up-to-date. Sometimes - not everytime - I will watch as one of my most recent emails that is cached on the phone suddenly vanishes as it pulls down the rest of the emails archived in that folder. As soon as that email vanishes, it will then automatically remove it from the server (being that it is IMAP) and that email is then gone for good. It has not been moved to trash or any other folder because I can subsequently log into Yahoo! mail for instance and do a complete search for it and it won't find it at all. At first I thought it was my fat thumb (!!!) that had acidentally hit delete on the email but it is happening around twice a week and it has only happened since getting my iPhone 4S. I have contacted Apple support by phone and they suggested completely wiping the phone and restoring from backup, of which I have done. I have changed various settings such as showing 50 recent messages rather than 1000, turing on "organize messages by thread" and "ask before deleting" and trying that for a week but none of that has helped. I have a feeling this is an iOS5 issue rather than a hardware issue because my iPad 2 has started to do the same thing and it never did it before I upgraded to iOS5. Nor did my old iPhone 3GS that I had for two years. I am losing important emails and I'm getting to the stage of thinking about never opening the Mail app on either device for fear of losing any more important emails. I'm considering resorting to logging into Yahoo! and iCloud webmail via Safari instead which is a bit of a pain. Very sorry for the long message but thought i'd best be as thorough as possible. If any of you guys have had similar issues, or if you have any suggestions please feel free to chime in. Many thanks.

Thanks to everyone for their replies - I thought that it was just me with this issue but clearly not. Also thank you to Mil_Prep and S2Linda's suggestions, unfortunately all three of my email accounts do not have a "Mail Days To Sync" option - I believe that this option only appears in Mail settings if the account is an exchange email account. Even if I was able to adjust the time period of emails to sync, I don't think that it would help because the email(s) that are going missing can be as recent as one day old, leaving all my earlier emails in the same folder intact - some of which can go back to the year 2002 for instance. I am still convinced that it is a bug with headers in iOS5. Last week I even had a related problem where I had a new email merge with an old email. The senders email address, subject title and date remained the same but the body of the text was replaced with an old email from 2006! Very odd....

HT4864 my iCloud emails disappear on all my devices after about a week and I can't find where they have gone, none of the devices say to delete from server, I move my samsung note emails to trash after reading - no other accounts are deleted from other de

My icloud email messages disappear on all my devices after about a week and I cannot locate them - not in archive on icloud.
I use several devices to receive emails - imac, ipad, iphone and samsung galaxy note. I put all read emails to trash on samsung, ipad and iphone but keep on imac and wish to retain there for reference. All other accounts remain but icloud emails disappear. No devices say to delete from server. Can anyone please help?

mazzaja wrote:
I put all read emails to trash on samsung, ipad and iphone but keep on imac and wish to retain there for reference. All other accounts remain but icloud emails disappear. No devices say to delete from server.
If this is your iCloud email account, whcn you delete an email from any of your devices, they are moved to the trash on all devices/computers, then the trash is automatically deleted after 30 days. That's how IMAP accounts work. You can't delete them from your device and keep it on the server because you are reading and deleting from the server itself.
If you want to keep them on your Mac, you'll need to move them to a folder rather than deleting them. When you do, they will be moved to the same folder on your other devices.

Difficulty Restoring IMAP emails with Time Machine

I use Gmail IMAP in Apple Mail and I'm finding it difficult to restore my inbox because the IMAP automatically synchronizes with the server after the Time Machine restore. Even when I take my account offline first and then do the TM restore, the emails disappear as soon as the account is brought back online.
How can I get my missing emails back without them disappearing?

This is strange - IMAP should be smart enough not to do that.
Try this.
create a local mailbox on your mac and move those messages there immediately after you restore them. Then take gmail online and allow it to sync. Now move those messages back to the gmail inbox and allow it to sync again. Hopefully, they will stay there.

Why is email disappearing from Trash after 7 days?

Email from my IMAP email account that I move to Trash disappears after 7 days even though my settings are set to remove "never" on all devices (iMac, MacBook Air, iPhone, iPad). Today is 4/22. The oldest email in Trash is dated 4/13.

Yup, as I stated, all my devices were set to delete "Never". I do manually empty my Trash on a regular basis, usually removing items after about a month so I have some time to retrieve something that becomes relevant again.
This is a new problem that suddenly started happening with no (apparent) changes to any settings. Unfortunately, I can't poinpoint it to an incident (e.g. software update or new device).
I've just changed all of my devices from delete Never to After One Month. I'll see if mail is deleted as indicated now, which would mean some setting somewhere got "stuck" on 7 days.
I'll also check with my IMAP host (BlueHost if anyone knows anything about them), although I've checked the server settings and there is nothing there to change the deletion frequency.
Thanks for the responses.

Sending (imap) email draft with attachment created on computer from iphone

Here's one situation:
I type up an email and attach an excel file to it, then save it as a draft (in my @me.com drafts).
The draft email is now visible in the drafts folder on all of my devices: apple mail on my computer that I originally used, my iphone mail drafts, and also by signing on to www.me.com and opening my mail drafts.
one problem is when you open up an email draft on me.com that was created on a computer mail.app, only to see the message body text lose all of its formatting and appear to be jumbled html.
My main concern / question is:
The email draft with attachment appears to be in tact on me.com and on the original computer, but NOT on the iphone. On the iphone, the attachment seems to disappear. Well, not disappear, because it gets replaced by a small rectangle with a blue question mark in it. Basically you cannot view the attachment on the iphone. When you try to send this draft from the iphone, it works, but with jumbled text & no attachment.
Does anyone have similar problems???

You are correct about the iDisk app as I have started to use that a little bit more for the sharing purposes.
However my concern wasn't over the simple task of getting excel files onto the iPhone. It's the fact that email attachments that are either in drafts, OR ALSO if you move a message (with an attachment) into an IMAP email folder, are completely lost when it comes to viewing or sending them from the iPhone. It's stupid - the attachments are still there on my computer (and I think they are still there on the me.com mail viewer as well).
Sometimes I move certain important work emails (that have attachments) into an IMAP email folder so they can be accessed from anywhere. The fact that the iPhone shows the paperclip and placeholder bit not the actual file is maddening. At least If the attachment was actually SENT from the iPhone, I wouldn't even care about not being able to view it (or even view the File name that is also lost).

IMAP email - not updating back at the office

I've been using IMAP email and could always delete or move items around my folders on the iPhone and everything would be identical in Outlook. I could sit in front of outlook and see the items disappear or move as I manipulated them on the iPhone. Not the case since 2.0 update. I'm back to using expunge.exe command to process all the edits done on the iphone.
I know this was an issue in early iphones versions.. and then fixed in a later update.
I have exchange 2000 and can't use the new exchange mail.
Have I missed something? or did 2.0 revert back to the earlier problem?

HHaving the same issue here,im don't think you can roll back.
did it start after crashing while trying to send an email with multiple attachments?

E72, IMAP mailbox disappearing

Hello,
I got a E72 that got in China and I got some major issues with a SMTP/IMAP mail setup.
(I got my Hotmail set up as well and it works just fine)
I have updated my phone to the latest firmware - as of today.
Okay, when I go in and setup my smtp account it works for some time, but then the mail counter will disappear from the home screen and in the also under Menu/Email (The Hotmail account is still there). I have to restart the phone and it normally comes back. This has been going on for some time now.
Lately I have had a new issue with this IMAP account, now I can see the mailbox, but I can't open the mails! I see all the mails in the inbox, but I can't open them or delete them. If I try a couple of time the phone jumps back to the home screen and I can't even access the mailbox. The phone still gets all the new mails whenever I get new mail.
Hope there is some help out there, Thanks.

I have seen the same issue with IMAP mailbox disappearing. At times I've noticed that if you have the mailbox already open and then try to open it again say after a short gap, the mailbox disappears. But it actually does not and once you go to the already open mailbox by looking at all open apps, your mailbox opens. I will have to think this is a bug in E72. Latest FW does fix few memory issues with email but its still far from being perfect.

Email disappearing from iPad when I download in iMac

My wife is having the problem that looks like the ISP's (GCI.net) email server is deleting email from my iPad.
With her iMac off, when she is traveling, she can download and read email on her iPad. All the email stays there, unless she intentionally deletes something.
BUT, when she get home from a trip and goes to check email using Apple's Mail on her iMac, which is set to "Remove from server ...," she can WATCH as the email disappears from her iPad -- I have watched this. This has been very frustrating, as I have tried everything I can think of to no avail. My old PowerMac and my older iPod Touch has no problem with GCI email. I have gobs of savedemail on the iPod with the same Mail settings on the PowerMac (I do plan to upgrade to an Intel Mac, this fall, btw).
Searching the web and here inthe Apple forums, I have so far not found anyone with this situation. It acts like the email content on the iPad is only what is on the GCI.net servers. When my iMac removes those, they disappear from the iPad. But, I seen no settings on the iMac or iPad that will fix this. I have tried everything I can think of.
Her Gmail account works fine on her iPad.
The iMac is set up with POP account. (As is my PMG5). The iPad was forced to set up a POP account (as a possible solution) for GCI email because the default IMAP is where we first discovered the issue of the server appearing to delete email from the iPad.
Thanks in advance for your help.

Some of the older 30-pin-to-USB cables have catches on the iPad end. The connector block on them extends further from the iPad than the ones without the catch; they are almost square. You have to squeeze the sides of the connector to disengage the catches.
I'm not sure what being in iTunes has to do with it, though.

Have iMac with IMAP email, 3rd party. Use a rule to sort emails into various boxes. One box does not appear on Mail in new iPhone 5C. Emails sorted into that box are also missing.

Have iMac with IMAP email, 3rd party. Use a rule to sort emails into various boxes. One box does not appear on Mail in new iPhone 5C. Emails sorted into that box are also missing. Any suggestions?

In which this just gets weirder and weirder...
I logged onto iCloud.com, signed into my account and created a rule there that emails from my husband's address should be allowed into the inbox. I sent another test msg from him to me and got the New Mail notification sound, the new mail showed up but in a flash disappeared. This happened in the space of about 3 seconds.
Messages from his email address are not even showing up in the Trash folder. WTH?

My work emails disappeared today on Iphone, but my yahoo emails remain. Why?

I have an Iphone 3GS and I have my yahoo account and my work account on the phone. I save the necessary emails that I might need when away from my computer. This morning I turned on my phone to check emails and my work emails disappeared completely (getting new emails on phone however). All of my Yahoo emails still remain. Why is this happening and how do I get them back?
Thank you

POP accounts do not synchronize across multiple clients; the POP3 protocol was invented at a time when personal computers were new, and no one anticipated that anyone would ever have more than one device to read email. So when multiple devices became available the IMAP protocol was developed; IMAP makes the server the master copy, and replicates mail to all clients and keeps them synchronized. So deleting or moving a message on one client updates the server, and then the other clients the next time they sync. Yahoo uses IMAP, which is why it works as you described. Exchange is similar to IMAP, but uses a different lower level protocol that allows "push" to the clients so they don't have to request updates.
As your work accounts are POP3 mail should never be deleted unless you delete it, or you have automatic deleting set up in the settings. So it sounds like something went wrong on your phone; possibly a "toxic" malformed email was received that corrupted the Inbox, and mail.app recovered be emptying the Inbox. It's unlikely that those emails can be recovered. You can try restoring the backup if you had synced recently, but that will overwrite everything that has been received since.
If at all possible you should switch to an IMAP or Exchange account for your work email to protect against this in the future (and also take advantage of other IMAP benefits, such as folders).

Imap emails disappear

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