Inbox not openning

Question

When I open Mail the inbox window says "Opening mailbox..." but it just keeps spinning and never opens. When I open my Sent mailbox, I do see all my sent mail, but it says "Rebuilding table of contents (70% done)..." but hasn't budged in hours.
For the last few weeks, most emails that come in say "this message has not been downloaded from the server, to view it you must take it online...". So I quit mail and start it up and the email is there.
Contacted my ISP, the connestion is fine.
Any ideas?
Amy

Answer 1

Your post lacks essential information, namely the version of Mac OS X you’re using. Please fill in the Operating System field on your My Settings's profile (and click Save), so that this information automatically appears in all your posts.
It looks like you have the problem described in the following article, although it may be too late now to solve it doing what the article suggests:
Overstuffed mailbox is unexpectedly empty
Assuming this is a POP account, you may be able to solve the Inbox problem as follows. A similar procedure (or doing what the article suggests) should allow you to solve the Sent problem:
1. Quit Mail if it’s running.
2. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Mail/POP-username@mailserver/.
3. Locate INBOX.mbox and move it to the Desktop.
4. Open Mail. A new empty INBOX.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 INBOX.mbox appears to be a file, it’s actually a special kind of folder (a package) that contains several files. Ctrl-click on INBOX.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. Depending on the size of the mbox file, 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 couldn’t be transferred 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 INBOX.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 INBOX.mbox in step 5 because it’s a package instead of a plain folder, rename INBOX.mbox to just INBOX (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 using the MBOX Breaker Script available at Allan Sampson’s website, or with Emailchemy. 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, i.e. ~/Library is the Library folder within the user’s home folder.