Inbox Messages Disappear after Rebuild

My Inbox went blank after doing a Rebuild on that box. I checked under Users>Myname>Library>Mail and the Inbox was full of messages. Why can't I see them now? Any suggestions for a fix? Using 10.5.1 on a new iMac.

I came here looking for an answer to the same question.
I have a client that recently migrated from a Macbook Pro running 10.4.11 to an iMac running 10.5.1.
Things seemed OK for a week, but Mail started behaving funny: lots of duplicate messages, old messages showing up in the Inbox (from 2005, 2006), old spam, etc.
I went to remove the Envelope Index file, and Mail went to "re-import" the messages on the next startup. It stayed stuck on 0 of 45000 (estimate) and then finally crashed.
I put the Envelope Index file back in, and started again. Kept getting the exclamation point on the Inbox, with a message indicating that the mailbox was locked on the server side (strange, since this is the only machine accessing it).
I decided to try a Rebuild of the Inbox file.
Everything vanished.
I went into the Inbox mail file, and saw there was a folder called "Messages" and another called "Messages-1".
"Messages" only had 4 messages in it - the 4 that downloaded after the Rebuild function wiped everything. "Messages-1" had about 3000+ messages in it, which seemed to appear OK when I looked at the dates.
However, after I reimported the messages using the import feature in Mail, I had a few from today, and the rest were from October 24th and before. None were dated in the last 2 months (or few days for that matter).
I've been on hold with Support for over an Hour, and I guess I'm going to give up. This is pretty bad though. I can piece back most of the messages from the previous migration, and pull from the last 2 weeks on the server, but I can't believe I witnessed the Messages folder get wiped in front of my eyes (the second time).

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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

Apple Mail inbox message disappear after a week

I have a brand new iMac running 10.8.2. I am using the Apple Mail program to view emails from an AT&T DSL account.
The emails just disappear after a certian time and I can not find any setting for this in preferences (note this is not deleted e-mail, but rather all email in my inbox) As of 4/3, the oldest email is dated 3/27 in my inbox.
The emails are on the AT&T server still, and my old iMac is also receiving them and not removing them.
How do I change this please?

Quit Mail.
Back up all data. That means you know you can restore the Mail database, no matter what happens.
Triple-click the text on the line below to select it:
~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Envelope Index
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C). In the Finder, select
Go ▹ Go to Folder
from the menu bar. Paste into the box that opens (command-V), then press return.
A Finder window will open with a file selected. Move the selected file to the Desktop, leaving the window open. Other files in the folder may have names that begin with "Envelope Index". Move those files, if any, to the Trash. Relaunch Mail. It should prompt you to re-import your messages. You may get a warning that the index is corrupt and that Mail has to quit. Click OK.
Test. If Mail now works as expected, you can delete the file you moved to the Desktop. If you get a warning that the file is in use when you try to empty the Trash, log out and log back in.

TS3899 Why do my iphone inbox messages disappear?

My inbox messages disappear without warning.

Where are the messages coming from?
The Messages app on the iPhone covers both messages to and from other iOS devices (Iphone, iPod Touch & iPad) over wi-fi, as well as the SMS/MMS messaging with most any cell phone. SMS/MMS messages cannot be received by the Messages app on an iPad or the iPod Touch.

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.

Inbox Messages disappearing

Hi there, folks. I have 3 email accounts I use with my Mac Mail (OS 10.4.8). Two are IMAP and one is a .Mac. I've been using Mac Mail for a good year or so without problems. Recently, messages have been disappearing from my Inboxes. Usually leaving the most recent 20 or so messages intact. The disappearing emails are nowhere to be found. My host for the two IMAP accounts have no quota limits. The .Mac account seems to be fine (no messages disappearing). I've cleaned out the trash and any large attachments. But it is still doing this. Any thoughts? It's very frustrating. I'd really appreciate any insight on this issue.

Do you have another computer (either Mac or Windoze) available to you, that you can use to access the affected imap accounts? If so, are all messages displayed there? How about webmail access? If so, same question?
Are any of these messages in a different folder, that you need to click on the right-pointing triangles next to the gray globes associated with the affected accounts, to make them downward-pointing triangles, thereby expanding the accounts to show all their mail folders? Or are all these messages in the inbox? IF some of these "missing" messages are in a separate folder, they won't show up in the main inbox in Mail.app.
If you ascertain that all messages are intact in the inbox when accessed from another platform or by a different venue, and it is a case of them not being visible on this particular Mac in Mail.app, you might first try reapplying the 10.4.9 intel or PPC combo update. (I'm assuming you're at 10.4.9. Google "10.4.9 PPC combo update" or "10.4.9 intel combo update"). Why? It has been reported by a number of people over in the ichat forum that reapplying a combo update, even though the user was already at that OS minor rev level, cured their iChat problems by so doing. I suggested the combo update approach to a guy with an AddressBook problem once, and although he had actually fixed his AddressBook problem by some other means, he did say that some other annoyances that he had been experiencing went away and that the combo update seemed to make his computer run a little bit better, so you really don't have anything to lose by doing so, except maybe 15 mins of your time. I would also recommend running software update when done, just to make sure that reapplying the combo update didn't walk on any later-issued security patches. And, of course, run Repair Permissions in Disk Utility before doing the combo update.
If no joy from doing all that, at that point, I would be really tempted to delete the affected imap accounts from Mail > Preferences > Accounts. You'll get splash screens during the account deletion process reassuring you that only the local junk on your Mac is the only thing getting deleted, and the actual imap accounts, and the messages stored on the remote imap servers, will be unharmed. (This is quite different from the splash screen you get when deleting pop accounts that says you are about to delete all your saved mail). Bottom line -- read the splash screen carefully, if any doubt -- cancel out and don't delete the account -- request further guidance in this forum.
If you were to do this, be sure to write down each account's settings (imap/smtp server names, ports, SSL checkboxes statuses, authentication methods, etc.) to facilitate an easy reconstruction of the mail accounts in Mail.app.
And, after deleting the affected accounts, quit Mail.app, then relaunch it and recreate those accounts.

Mail inbox messages disappear with gmail IMAP

I've just set up an IMAP connection to my gmail account in Mail and after reading a message in my inbox, the message disappears from my inbox and I can only find the email in All Mail.
Looking in gmail, the gmail inbox still contains all of the emails that should be in it, so I know that gmail isn't filtering or archiving read emails. Additionally, on my phone my inbox shows properly so I know that my problem lies with Mail itself.
I have deleted all my rules from Mail, so I know no filtering is going on at the Mail level either.
If anybody could please help me out...
Thanks,
Shawn

Sept 6, 2011, OS 10.6.8
MAIL 4.5
Mail to one mail box only, IMAP, disappears.
Reappears on restart of Mail.
No rules set for this in preferenes.
No check box rules in Preferences seem to apply.
Others on web report same problem.
iPhone receives and shows incomeing mail for this box fine.
It happened upon resetting incoming SSL port per instructions from Web email Server firm.
This complaint in reported around the mac sites from Mail at least v. 2.5 on. Isn't anyone at Apple working on the problem??

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

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)

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.

Mail in my inbox just disappears after a few weeks, why?

Mail in my inbox stays there for a few weeks and then disappears, only leaving me a few weeks worth of messages - similarly on my .mac webmail. Can't find any preferences to stop this happening.
Any Ideas?

The same behaviour does not happen with the iMac and so
I use this as backup.
Well, it doesn’t happen there because it stores mail locally instead of on the server but, interestingly enough, the iMac is almost certainly the culprit. What are your Preferences > Accounts > Advanced > Remove copy from server settings there?
I never changed the iMac .mac account from POP to .mac as I
would have had to delete the account and create a new one
and would have thus lost everything.
This isn’t entirely correct. For one thing, you don’t have to delete the POP account first. You can set up the account as .Mac without deleting the POP account, transfer your mail from the POP account’s mailboxes to the .Mac account’s mailboxes, and delete the POP account afterwards. Alternatively, you could create custom “On My Mac” mailboxes and move your mail from the POP account’s mailboxes into them before deleting the account.
Before doing anything, however, be sure to quit Mail and make a backup copy of the ~/Library/Mail folder, just in case something goes wrong. You can do this in the Finder by dragging the folder to the Desktop while holding the Option (Alt) key down, for example. This is where all your mail is locally stored.
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user's home folder, i.e. ~/Library is the Library folder within the user's home folder.

Message disappeared after I turned off my phone?

I got a notification that I had a new message, then I turned my phone off and on again and it wasn't there anymore. How can I find this message?

There is no message in my inbox nor the notification center. Maybe I turned the phone off while it was downloading the message?

Messages disappear after sending, cannot sign in with apple id

I have an iphone 4s that when I send a text message, as soon as I send it the message I sent disappears off my phone. It goes thru to the recipient tho. If I restart the phone, my sent messages re-apear. Also, I cannot sign in with my apple ID. I get an error saying that my password is wrong or that there is a network error. I have 2 apple ID's and get the same errors with both. I've tried restarting the phone, hard reset, reset network settings, nothing has worked so far. I'm not able to sign in to re-activate imessage, update apps etc.

UPDATE....I reset ALL setting on the phone. This seems to have fixed things. imessage works again and texts appear as they should. The only glitch is that a bunch of recent text are dated April8 and 9 2012.

Has anyone had all text messages disappear after upgrading iOS6 on iPhone 4?

My Text text message screen froze. I restarted my phone at which time all of my text messages and iMessages were wiped clean.

Here is an idea, copy your important texts in notes so u can sync them. If you keep texts that long save them that way. I thought all texts were erased after an update anyway, maybe I am wrong but then again I don't keep texts forever.

Will an audio message disappear after a certain time even if the receiver has not listened to them?

I have noticed that sometimes i will send someone an audio snippet and they don't get it, I know it expires after two minutes from being heard does that time limit also apply to them even if they aren't heard?

It would be stupid if it did. After all, what's the point if the user on the receiving end never got to hear it?
Tl;dr: Nope.

Inbox Messages Disappear after Rebuild

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