Mail doesn't show new messages

Question

Mail sometimes doesn't show new messages for an IMAP account. The badge in the dock says that there is a new mail but it doesn't show up in the inbox. I'm sure that I didn't just miss it, because, smart mailboxes will not find that new mail as well. When I restart mail, the mail finally shows up in the inbox as well.
Anybody else seeing this and what can I do to resolve that issue?
Thanks!

Answer 1

I'll bring everyone up to speed on what's been happening with my family accounts. I first suspected Safari, because it seemed to be a local problem, but then, inexplicably, all mobileme mail accounts tied to that family account, which included 4 subaccounts and 1 mail-only account, not only did not work in mail.app, but also failed in other email clients I tested, including clients on Linux. Also, the webmail version was not working well, either.
So, if your problem is isolated to a single computer and just to mail.app, or just with a particular network, then I think the local troubleshooting steps are the way to go.
But, if your problem extends to other platforms, clients, and webmail, then it is likely an issue the engineers at Apple will have to figure out. I found the online chat service for mobileme users to be very helpful in checking through all the 'usual suspects' and after we had pretty much ruled out any of the usual culprits, it was escalated to the engineers, who are working on it now.
They were able to release all the email that had been piling up, but there are still some glitches they are trying to iron out. As an aside, I have been personally managing various mail servers for a dozen years, and am well aware of the difficulties in diagnosing email problems, and it was stumping me, and I have intimate knowledge of Exim and Exchange and various email modules used with mx services.
+While this 'should never happen', it's unrealistic for users to expect it never will. Of all the services provided on the Internet, email, is arguably the most complex service and it's become much more complex in the past few years. In my work, typically 94% of all email traffic hitting the server is filtered out as spam. So, the 6% that is allowed through is the stuff most of us see and are spending time and resources filtering out the 20-40% additional unwanted spam that the host let through because if they tightened it down any further the risk of false positives would become too great. I spend way more time on the mail service aspects of my job than the web services, and mail problems occupy at least 80% of my troubleshooting logs. So, while email seems more 'simple' than the exotic and bandwidth intensive services like video chat, voip, and web2 transactions, compared to the amount of wasted bandwidth and cpu cycles filtering packets, I think email is the number one problem service for most host providers. We tried to depend upon it for mission-critical communications, and it was never designed for that initially, and the spammers are making certain it won't achieve that status at least in the near future. If anything, email is your least dependable Internet service. Combine this with the growing array of user configurations, email clients, forwarding/retrieving/syncing scenarios, and user experience, and you may find yourself uttering a little prayer now and then for the poor email administrators and support personnel.+
[end of sermon - thanx for letting me get that off my chest; I feel better now! I'll feel a lot better when my email is flowing smoothly, but that's out of my hands for now.]