Mail gone psycho

Hi
My mail program has gone nuts on me. Occasionally I quit mail and it restarts by itself over and over and over. Often it prevents me from shutting down so I have to force quit it. But for the last three days I have been receiving about 200 spams to both my inbox and junk mail pile. BUT I delete them and they reappear almost instantly, same mail same senders same date. But I cannot receive any new mail after two days ago. Anybody have an idea what is causing this? I deleted the preferences plist but nothing has changed
Thanks
Enio

Hi Enio.
What type of mail account is this (POP, IMAP, .Mac)? If POP, what are your Preferences > Accounts > Advanced > Remove copy from server settings?
You may be able to get rid of those messages in Mail doing Edit > Cut (⌘X) (for best results do it with one message at a time), but you may need to remove them from the server first. Does this account allow web access?
You may find the Account Info window useful to solve this problem -- choose Get Info (⌘I) from the Action menu (gear icon) located below the mailboxes list in the main Mail window.
Occasionally I quit mail and it restarts by itself over and over and over.
You probably have a piece of software such as a Dashboard widget or a system utility, or iCal remainders, or something like that, that requires Mail to be running for whatever it does.

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Mail gone mad

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Hi Mike, I rarely hear good things about Norton on Macs.
Little Snitch, stops/alerts outgoing stuff...
http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
Get MacScan...
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ClamXAV, free Virus scanner...
http://www.clamxav.com/
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http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4650

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Hello yellow ducky,
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Inbox and sent mail gone after re-entering account settings in preferences

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Hi there,
I have just realized what a big mistake I just made. I have trouble sending a particular email. While on the helpline with my ISP we tried all sorts of things and one of them was deleting the account and creating it all over again.
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You’re welcome.
Mail 2.x stores messages locally in individual *.emlx files within ~/Library/Mail/. For IMAP or .Mac accounts, if Preferences > Accounts > Advanced > Keep copies of messages for offline viewing is set to All messages and their attachments, Mail would keep a local copy of the messages on the server using the same *.emlx format.
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Before trying to locate the *.emlx files that appear to not have been deleted, you may want to try to recover the messages that have been deleted. If the messages are not on the server, and you don’t have a backup, your only option in the case of Mail 2.x is to try to salvage as many deleted *.emlx files as possible with a data recovery tool such as Data Rescue II, TechTool Pro, or FileSalvage (the files to be recovered would be different in the case of Mail 1.x). Of these, the only one I know for sure that can recover deleted *.emlx files is FileSalvage. Stop using your computer right now if you want to try that, as anything you do with the computer may cause the deleted files to be overwritten.
After having tried (or discarded) recovering the deleted *.emlx files, make a backup copy of the ~/Library/Mail folder to avoid accidentally losing those that seem to not have been deleted yet. You can do this in the Finder by dragging the folder to the Desktop while holding the Option (Alt) key down, for example.
When done, post the contents of the following folders:
~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/
~/Library/Mail/Mac-username/
~/Library/Mail/Mac-username/INBOX.imapmbox/
p.s. Nice to see someone else in Spain.
Yes, but you’re not Spanish, are you?

Mailbfr - f old mails gone, mailbfr - f old mails gone

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Not certain, but this can fix myriad Mail problems...
Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), it will try to repair your Disk Directory while the spinning radian is happening, so let it go, run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, then move this folder & file to the Desktop.
Move this Folder to the Desktop...
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Caches/Mail/
Move this file to the Desktop...
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail/Envelope Index
Reboot.

Rebuild mailbox, all mails gone...

One mailbox of mine showed only headers but no message in the body. So i tried to rebuild. Now all (but one) mails the inbox are gone. In the send box the header are there, the body messages not (don't think i will rebuild again..). And yes, i didn't backup lately....
So were can i find the lost messages (or does the system dispose of them immidiately when you hit "rebuild")

Rebuild does not dispose of messages. Did you wait patiently for Rebuild to finish, and wait until message list disappears before reappearing?
However, if the message bodies were already gone, then Rebuild would further remove the list messages.
In the Finder, open Home/Library/Mail -- if the mailbox rebuilt was the Inbox, then open the Account folder (likely a POP Account folder?), and further open the INBOX.mbox folder, and then further open the Messages folder within. How many xxxx.emlx files is the Messages folder reported to contain?
If the mailbox in question was one you created, then in the Mail folder, find and open the Mailboxes folder where that would reside, and make the same examination.
Ernie

I didn't upgrade ICloud storage in time is my mail gone?

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It's possible that you are having a problem with some Firefox add-on that is hindering your Firefox's normal behavior. Have you tried disabling all add-ons (just to check), to see if Firefox goes back to normal?
Whenever you have a problem with Firefox, whatever it is, you should make sure it's not caused by one (or more than one) of your installed add-ons, be it an extension, a theme or a plugin. To do that easily and cleanly, run Firefox in [http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode safe mode] (don't forget to select ''Disable all add-ons'' when you start safe mode). If the problem disappears, you know it's from an add-on. Disable them all in normal mode, and enable them one at a time until you find the source of the problem. See [http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Troubleshooting+extensions+and+themes this article] for information about troubleshooting extensions and themes and [https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Troubleshooting+plugins this one] for plugins.
If you need support for one of your add-ons, you'll have to contact its author.
If the problem does not disappear when all add-ons are disabled, please tell me, so we can work from there. Please have no fear of following my instructions to the line, as all can be easily undone.

Mail gone, wont quit or display anything after update...

Hi Folks,
In the process of helping my dad upgrade his G4 mini to 10.5.6 from 10.4.something. He's on dialup still so screen sharing to get him going is not really an option and I"m trying to help him with this over the phone and it's slow going. The upgrade DVD ran fine and there were no problems that he noted. The machine is now running 10.5.6 that came on the DVD all OK. It is able to go online and safari works. Mail however has choked.
THe window opens when you run the program, but no mail is displayed when you select inbox or any other mailbox. The right hand pane of emails is blank. He is able to select to write an email and has sent several to me but they were never actually sent, nor do they show in the drafts or send email or any other email box. I have attempted to rebuild the mailboxes from the mailbox menu, and while it allows him to select this it doesn't help, still no messages displayed.
Further, Mail wont quit. When you try to quit it it hangs and it requires that you force quit it before you can restart the machine.
All the account preferences and passwords and addresses appear to still be there, you can go to preferences and see the settings. This is a POP account not an imap account, so there should be local copies of all the messages he has received and kept in his inbox.
I suspect a database issue or something? Is there a way to totally rebuild the database from scratch?
I did try running the vacuum index command from the terminal and that ran without returning any errors, but did not fix the problem.
Any suggestions greatly appreciated thank you!

I found it! Here is the answer from "troubleshooting".
Resolution
Force quit Mail if necessary: From the Apple menu, choose Force Quit, select Mail in the Force Quit window's list of applications, then click "Force Quit".
If the issue persists after relaunching Mail, follow these steps while Mail is not running:
From the Finder's Go menu choose Go to Folder.
Go to this location (type or paste the tollowing, then click Go):
~/Library/Mail
Move the items named "MessageRules.plist" and "MessageRules.plist.backup" to another location, such as your desktop.
Note: If you previously upgraded from Mac OS X 10.3 to Mac OS X 10.5, the files will be named "MessageSorting.plist" and "MessageSorting.plist.backup".
Open Mail. Note: At this point you can either set your Junk Mail settings and re-create your Mail rules manually in Mail preferences, or follow the next two steps (if you re-create rules and Junk settings, do not perform the following steps).
Quit Mail.
Place the items named "MessageRules.plist" and "MessageRules.plist.backup" back in the ~/Library/Mail folder (replace any copies that were added to ~/Library/Mail when you opened Mail).

Mail gone psycho

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