Inbox Messages disappearing

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.