Mail downloading phantom messages

Hi everybody. Something strange is happening from about 2/3/ days ago. When I open Mail, on the Mail activity box there are 6 messages downloading but then no new message show up in any of the mailboxes. This is happening every 10-15 minutes. I have checked in the spam folder and there are no messages there either. The normal mail functions (sending and receiving)are working fine, but I wonder if i should be worried about this Mail behavior. Thanks for any help

I'm having the same issue. Have you figured it out?

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Mail downloads all messages– how to stop it

Using OS 10.9.1 now, but this behavior is for previous OS versions, as well.
I use Mail with Yahoo IMAP, and it downloads all messages to my hard drive. Can I set it not to do that? The preferenences are set to " Check for new messages manually" and have been for years, but it still downloads every message. Is the "checking" process independent of the downloading of messages? I kind of thought I could control these two processes. In other words, can I set Mail to download only the messages that are less than one year old or to show the messages, but not download them? I know I can use the web to view without downloading, but here in China, the web is sometimes "off" for Yahoo, while a mail client can still show Yahoo email, so it is often necessary to use the Mail app to see email. I just don't need them saved to my hard drive.

I was searching to see if Apple Mail and Yahoo Imap downloads everything when I came across your post! While I like that, it would be good if someone could tell us where the setting/option is for it.
Perhaps in Yahoo itself? Nah! That doesn't make sense. It should be on the client side (if I have my terminology correct!)

Why doesn't Apple mail download Gmail messages that were sent to myself?

When I e-mail myself to my Gmail address, the message sits in the Gmail inbox but Apple
Mail doesn't download it.
Mail downloads every other message in the Gmail inbox, but not the ones i've addressed to myself to my Gmail address.
Any ideas for why this is happening?

Gmail POP access doesn’t work like a normal POP mail server would. Here are some of its idiosyncrasies:
1. Messages downloaded by any conventional POP mail client are marked as downloaded at the server (but not as read on the web), and no longer available to either the same or any other POP mail client.
2. To make already downloaded messages available for POP access again, you must go to Gmail’s Settings > Forwarding and POP page, select Enable POP for all mail, and click Save Changes, which causes everything (and I mean everything) still on the server to be downloaded again.
3. The Mail > Preferences > Accounts > Advanced > Remove copy from server settings have absolutely no effect on the messages stored on Gmail’s server. Gmail ignores any requests to delete messages from the server made by a POP client. What happens to the messages on the server after a POP client has downloaded them is determined by Gmail’s Settings > Forwarding and POP > When messages are accessed with POP setting alone. In the case of Gmail (and only in that case), I recommend turning OFF Remove copy from server in Mail, so that Mail doesn’t even try to remove any messages from the server, regardless of whether you do actually want already downloaded messages to be removed from the server after some time or not.
4. Messages sent using the web interface will be downloaded by your POP mail client as if they were received messages. Although this may seem weird, it's good because it allows archiving all messages locally in Mail, regardless of how they were sent — as long as you don't access the same Gmail account with more than one POP mail client, that is. You can set up a rule in Mail to automatically route those messages to the appropriate Sent mailbox (or to any other mailbox for that matter) if that's what you want.
5. Messages sent using a POP/SMTP mail client such as Mail are also treated as if they were incoming messages for POP purposes, just as in #4. What prevents them from being downloaded is that Gmail marks them as already downloaded immediately. Since they’re on the server nonetheless, already sent messages would be downloaded together with all the other messages on the server if proceeding as described in #2.
6. A particular case of #5 are messages sent to yourself. Instead of putting a copy of the sent message in the server’s Inbox and making it available for download, both the sent and the “received” message on the server are actually one and the same, and hence, cannot be downloaded via POP for the reason explained in #5.
7. Gmail allows POP accounts to be set up in a special way that avoids some of these issues while introducing others. If you only need POP access to the last 30 days of mail, you may configure Mail in “recent mode”, as described in Using POP on multiple clients or mobile devices. Configuring the account this way would allow Mail to download messages marked by Gmail as already downloaded (and download messages sent to yourself in particular), but it would also cause all sent messages (not just messages sent to yourself or through webmail) to be downloaded as if they were received messages.

Mail downloading deleted messages

I have three pop3 mail accounts, each set to delete messages on the server 7 days after download. Since iCloud was enabled, messages I have already deleted on my iPad are re downloaded. Is tis intended behavior?

I have three pop3 mail accounts, each set to delete messages on the server 7 days after download. Since iCloud was enabled, messages I have already deleted on my iPad are re downloaded. Is tis intended behavior?

Mail downloads oldest messages instead of most recent

I've recently setup hotmail using POP3 settings on the mail application on my Ipod Touch. The only problem is that it downloads the 50 OLDEST messages (out of 1000s) instead of the 50 most RECENT messages. I like to keep an archive of old emails on the hotmail server for reference, so I don't want to move or delete the old messages, but I want the most recent messages to display on the Ipod. Can anyone help with this issue?

Hi,
I have the same problem but with another email provider. Have you found a solution to the reverse order problem yet? I have to scroll through about 1000 email until the most recent are found.

Apple mail downloading old messages again

This happens to me every once in two/three months and is annoying like **** but have never been able to find situation. Here is what happens, i have 4 emails configured on my apple mail and they work just fine. I have settings where it leaves the copy of email at the server.
Now, after every few weeks it starts downloading some old emails automatically and it doesn't download all emails.. It just pick and chooses. For example, friday i had 50 unread emails and saturday evening i had 285. When i started checking my email, these are mostly old emails that i have already read but they are on server.
The oldest i got is from 12/17/2012 today is 3/17/2013 So its last 4 months but i also know its not downloading all emails in this time because then it would be like 10000 unread emails.
I can delete the ones i got again and kinda fix it temporarily but this will happen for sure again in couple of months. Any solid way to fix it forever? I care now because i only have 1 GB Storage left... lol, i know its lazy
Thanks a ton in advance.

Hello, I'd try this...
Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions...
Open Mail, highlight the problem Mailbox, choose Rebuild from Mail's Mailbox menu.

Opening messages and having them save on desktop rather than mail downloads

how do I make it so that when I click on an attachment in an email message, it will be downloaded into my desktop and not my mail downloads folder. when I had panther, it always just moved any documents or files I opened on the message directly onto desktop so I could find it and move it into the proper folder quicker. I never even used the save function on the message so the downloads folder on my dock would be obsolete. maybe thats why its there, but honestly it takes more time to do it like that so I prefer to just have the ones I need and want to open moved to the desktop as I open it for the first time.

I guess my question wasn't specific enough. Im actually talking about when I double click an attachment that is on the email and it opens with the correct application, the attachment then saves itself onto the Mail Downloads folder which is located under the Library folder. I think what you mean is when I press Save for my attachments, that I can change where it goes. Which is not my concern at this time. With the previous OS, I could double click an attachment and it would immediately save to my desktop and not the Mail Downloads folder in the Libary.

Mail App stopped downloading new messages from Gmail

I'm using MBP with OS X Lion.
I've been using Mail App for my two Gmail accounts. I also use two different types of mail downloading systems (POP and IMAP) for them. For some reason, the speed of downloading new messages started slowing down a few weeks ago; however, I could still use it until today. Today, it seems like it is completely out.
It just stopped downloading new messages completely.
For the POP account, it says:
There may be a problem with the mail server or network. Verify the settings for account “POP” or try again.
The server returned the error: The connection to the server “pop.gmail.com” on port 995 timed out.
For the IMAP account, it says:
There may be a problem with the mail server or network. Verify the settings for account “IMAP” or try again.
The server returned the error: The connection to the server “pop.gmail.com” on port 993 timed out.
The weird part is that I can still send an email out of those accounts fine.
I checked the settings for Gmail, and everything seemed just fine.
I tried to re-do everything so deleted the IMAP account. Now it shows the message below:
The Google IMAP server “imap.gmail.com” is not responding. Try checking the network connection, and that the server name is correct. Otherwise, the server might be temporarily unavailable. If you continue, you might not be able to receive messages.
I tried Connection Doctor and it shows as below:
I followed the suggestion by changing unchecking those boxes for SSL, but it didn't help either.
I tried "Rebuild" under mail box menu bar but it also didn't do anything.
Can anyone help me with this issue?
Thank you in advance.

By the way, my Mail App is version 5.3

MAIL: Trying to settle long-lasting problem. Mail always immediately downloads the messages I delete from any IMAP mailbox. I'm running out of HD space!

BACKGROUND
I only have 60GB of space on my MacBook Air. Currently, three long-standing IMAP accounts are taking up over 7GB of it!
I have seen several related discussions about this kind of problem, but they all seem to have been solved or glossed over with setting up the IMAP interaction so that messages are deleted from the server in addition to the device or with a "Mailbox > Use This Mailbox For" fix that doesn't work for me. I like being able to save all of my email history on servers (I'm often surprised by how many years back I have to search to find a piece of information I need), but I can no longer stand losing so much of my very limited local space to really old mail.
PROBLEM
I'll refer to just one of the relevant accounts as "Gmail," since that's in parentheses when seen in these screenshots. These are its current Mailbox Behaviors settings:
Under my Gmail Inbox in Mail, I have deleted every message from before 2013. The mail from 2013 is all that I want stored on my MacBook Air.
Ultimately, I think this has something to do with the Archive (seen in the sidebar above, as well). Even when I've deleted everything from before 2013 in my Inbox, AND emptied the entire contents of Trash manually, the Archive still contains all of the mail from the server (yes, this account was started in 2011, but I have others that go back much further).
The cherry on top is that when I delete the same messages from the Archive as I've deleted from the Inbox, Mail immediately begins re-downloading all of those messages. Last time I tried this my laptop had to download 23000 messages, but here's a screenshot of proof with a smaller sample:
In case my Gmail server settings are useful to consider, here they are:
Final Notes
• There's a lot that I don't know about exactly how IMAP communication occurs between a device and a server. For my sake and the sake of anyone else who needs this kind of help, please clarify terms like "flags" and "archive" (since Gmail and Mail both use the term and I don't know think they mean exactly the same thing) if/when you use them.
• If anyone does think that there's some sort of "Mailbox > Use This Mailbox For" solution to this, you should know that no matter what I have selected in Mail's sidebar (at no matter what level of indentation), the options available under that menu item are always grayed-out.
• I want to keep using Mail. There's a lot that I like about it and I don't want to switch to Thunderbird or something else (remember, I need to save as much local space as I can).
• I just upgraded to 10.9.0 Mavericks, but this problem has existed for me and behaved essentially just like this as long as I can remember. In fact, I think I recall the problem still existing before there was an Archive in the sidebar at all.

UPDATE
I still have the problem, but when I checked on this post to see if anyone had commented and I simply hadn't received an e-mail, I noticed that all but the last of the images I included have stopped displaying (I had friends check, too). Most of them were just visual examples of what I was explaining in hopes of giving context and all available info that I may not have personally viewed as relevant, but the first one, about my account's Mailbox Behaviors settings sure is important. These are the settings I have:
• Store draft messages on the server — Check
• Store sent messages on the server — Check
• Delete sent messages — One month old
• Store junk messages on the server — Check
• Delete junk messages — One week old
• Move deleted messages to the Trash mailbox — Grayed-out and Check
• Store deleted messages on the server — Grayed-out and Check
• Permanently erase deleted messages when — Quitting Mail
I hope this helps. Please comment if I'm leaving out any other important information.

Yahoo Mail: New Inbox Messages Are Not Downloaded To iPhone

Keywords: iPhone, Yahoo, mail, push, slow, broken, stopped, inbox, new messages, IMAP
Problem Description:
I just went through an entire day of restarting, restoring, reconfiguring my iPhone after the Mail App stopped downloading new messages from my Yahoo Inbox. Other folders could receive new messages, but not the Inbox.
After trying to get help from Apple support and Yahoo, I kept searching online. I managed to find a solution that worked and I thought I'd share this here in case anyone else has run into this problem, which I believe is a Yahoo issue, not an Apple one.
Solution:
From a web browser do the following
- Log into your Yahoo Mail account via mail.yahoo.com
- Create a new folder in Yahoo Mail (I called it "Archive")
- Move ALL MESSAGES from your Inbox to this new folder ("Archive" in my case)
- Send yourself a test message
After performing these steps (essentially archiving your Inbox to another folder), you should start receiving Yahoo Inbox messages again on your iPhone. After I performed the above procedure, Yahoo Mail has been more responsive than ever before on the iPhone - even faster than my old BlackBerry...
It seems as though the Yahoo IMAP server gets really slow or malfunctions when either there is a corrupt message or the Inbox gets too large (not sure which). It would be really cool if someone from Yahoo (or Apple) could confirm this.
I'd be interested to see if anyone else has run into this issue and if this procedure solves the issue for you... I know for me, I will be periodically Archiving my Inbox to another folder to keep things operating smoothly.
Good Luck!

Hmm.. this seems to work..
I emptied both "Spam" and "Trash" folder on a browser. After that, new emails seem to push to iPhone right away now. Let's see how long this will last..
Does that mean that I would have to make sure there's no email in these two folders to make push work at all time?

OSX Mail only downloads 1 message at a time

For some reason, recently, Mail has started downloading only 1 email at a time. If I've been away from the computer, I have to keep hitting get mail over and over for each email to be downloaded into my box. I have other email accounts in Mail that don't do that and it doesn't happen on my iphone, or in my gmail web based mail. Only in Mac Mail. HELP??? It's making me crazy! How do I fix it???

Hello harmonyjones.
Maybe the info provided by Google [here|http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13291&topic=12812] (click the link) will prove useful.
I also recommend using Gmail's IMAP access over POP. Google provides over 7 GB of storage at the moment, so I personally only download the message text with Mail.app and keep all the attachments on the server in order to save space on my hdd. If you want more info on how to switch to Gmail IMAP, I'll post a detailed description.
Good computing.
floba
(MN496)

Ihave an iphone 5. Everytime i click on my hotmail icon is says...cannot get mail. The connection to the server failed. i hit ok and then it downloads my messages. Also at the bottom the updated date is saying that it is june 4 not june 9th

I have an iphone 5. Everytime i click on my hotmail icon is says...cannot get mail. The connection to the server failed. I have to hit ok a couple of times and then it downloads my messages. Also at the bottom the updated date is saying that it is june 4 not june 9th

i would suggest deleting and readding the mail account in settings > mail contacts calendars

New mail in Gmail doesn't apper on iphone 4s without forcing it to download new messages

New mails in GMail doesn't appear on iPhone 4S without forcing it to download new messages
I was using hotmail in my iPhone 4S but many people suggested me to use GMail account because it is good for Syncing. I also have Mac so i ditched the hotmail and configured GMail account. Now everything works fine on my Mac but not in my iPhone 4S. When a new email comes to my inbox, my Mac display it normally but as far as my iPhone 4S is concerned, it doesn't show even a notification. However when i force it to download the new message by clicking the cricular arrow, it load them and shows them as well. It is not normal because it should do the same thing automatically, not manually. Do you know,how to fix it? AOL mail comes right though, both have the same settings.

DId you try, settings, notifications?
under your gmail or whatever mail you have you can choose to fetch every 15 minutes, hour, or manually. Sounds like you are on manually, when you open your email.
MAnually does save battery though.

Apple Mail in Yosemite not downloading complete messages

My Set Up:
- Early 2011 MacBook Pro 15 inch.
- Yosemite 10.10.1
Since I upgraded to Yosemite, my Apple Mail is not downloading email content. I have to manually click on each message header to download the content of that email. See the screenshots below.
This screenshot shows how the message appears in the Inbox when it comes first.
And if I don't do anything it will stay as is. And the below image shows the message with its downloaded body after I select the empty message.
How can I make the message download automatically (the way it was before I upgraded to Yosemite)? Not having my message download messes up with other Smart Mailboxes.
Any help is appreciated.

Ok. Thanks.
I archived maximum email from my account and left around 300 messages in my Inbox + Sent Items.
Then I Rebuilt the account. I saw in the lower left corner the Mail Activity status where it started downloading the messages.
In parallel I had the Activity Monitor open to check the CPU usage. It was around 30%.
It took around 5 to 10 mins to download those 300 messages. But on my mail app only some of the messages were completely downloaded while rest only showed the header and no body. I left it that way.
The Mail Activity is done with its job. The status bar is gone. But the Activity Monitor still shows Mail app at similar CPU utilization levels (around 30%).
The issue is that my Mail App does not show any additional messages downloading with their bodies. Its almost like it is stuck at message number X.
While the CPU is still showing 30% utilization by mail, I have switched the UI to NOT show any conversations. This way every message is visible in the list. I have put the mac on Caffeine for next 5 hours so that it does not sleep.
Will update the thread tomorrow.
Thanks for your help.

Everytime i start mail, it tries to download 840 messages and sticks at 22.

everytime i start mail, the activity window shows that it's trying to download 840 messages and sticks at #22...every time!
this only happens on my macbook. my other macs in the house are not doing this. it's driving me nuts. please help.

Please, give more details. What's your account type ? have you stopped using Mail on that Mac for reasonable amount of time to have 800+ messages on the servers and not on the Mac ? what happens when it is stuck at message #22 ? it might be a message with some big file attach that would take some time to download.

Mail downloading phantom messages

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