'Mail Activity' monitor shows lots of incoming mail-nothing there?? HELP

Question

Everytime I click on the 'get mail' button, down in the activity monitor, it will indicate that I have 24 emails, the progress bar actually moves across like its D/L'ing messages, but there are no messages in ANY folder, in-box, junk, trash, etc-nada.
So the next time I click 'get mail' it indicates that I have -25- messages...one more than the last count, but same thing, progress bar moves (quickly, like one message is coming in-nowhere near what you would think it would take to DL 25 emails), and same outcome-no new mail anywhere. Am I under attack? Its like 'phantom' emails that come in and find a place to hide! Is there a cache that I can clear somewhere? Should I delete and reinstall all accounts ( I have three coming in-Gmail, my personal domain email, and an att acct) or is there a fix known to a few or many that I have missed? Thanks. I am always concerned that Mac folks are to complacent about security-I certainly would hate to get breached and lose passwords, data, etc.
BTW I also check the 'sent' folder, and there are no new messages being sent that are showing up, so its not like any 'bug' I've seen or heard of.
Last point...... For several weeks, maybe a couple of months, I get a frequent email that has a 'from' julie, or mary, or anyone I dont know, with a subject line like 'hi. heres that address' or some nonsense. When I right-click it to delete, I can see that the entire message body consists of a few random order letters, like 'xqty' or 'tikjaw' or similar mumbo-jumbo. Has any one else seen any of these?
Thank in advance.
Respectfully,
Fred
Message was edited by: deltone for spalleeing
Message was edited by: deltone tune-up

Answer 1

You'd have to isolate which of your three email accounts is attempting to download the 25 messages. Disable all three and successively turn on only one at a time. It's hard to guess at what's happening right now, since you don't specify if you're using POP or IMAP.
Once you figure out if only one account has all 25 messages, or if the 25 total is spread out across all three (eg 10 in one, 7 in another, and 8 in the last), you should log into the webmail interface of the corresponding account(s). If you don't see any messages sitting in the webmail inbox, then it's likely that Apple Mail is seeing remnants of spam mail that were automatically processed and discarded by your email provider (but again, that's just a guess, since I have no idea if you're syncing via IMAP or not).
As for getting mail from Julie and Mary, that's clearly spam. If they are HTML-formatted, they likely have embedded iframes or web beacons. You can check the unformatted content of those messages via View>Message>Raw Source.