Mail not getting all messages from server and other strange behavior

Question

Hello All,
Mail has been doing some odd things for me of late (at least the last week) and I'm lost for a solution to my problem. As far as I can tell, perhaps my Prefs. have become corrupted, or at least something in relation to Mail has become corrupted. Perhaps someone has a solution to this issue before I have to back it all up and NUKE the whole **** app to get back up and running properly.
The main issue I appear to be having is that Mail is not getting all of my Mail messages from my server. I can log into my web-mail interface provided by my domain host and can see there that there are many e-mails that don't appear to be coming down the pipe to the Mail.app client. I'm getting some e-mail's but not all....
*Here are all the things that I've checked:*
• The missing e-mails are not being picked up as Junk and are not in the Junk folder
• I have done a search within Mail for the missing e-mail's and nothing turns up anywhere.
• I have checked on the server end that I'm not maxing out my InBox or that there are any other service issues from my domain host provider.
• I have been into Prefs and checked my account settings - most (see below) of which appear to be as normal and are fine.
*Here are the weird things that I've noticed:*
• When I went into the Prefs. for the account in question, I noticed that my login had changed. For example - it usually it is "[email protected]", however it had seemed to have changed to just "johndoe" - I know this wasn't me as my domain host will not allow me to access any mail unless the login is the full mail address.
• In RULES, every rule I double click to check on seems mostly fine, apart from the fact that every "Account is:" the pull down menu just appears as blank. Usually it says "Account is: ([email protected])"
It's there last 2 items that make me think something is corrupted - so I guess my question is, what pref or file has corrupted and how can I fix it without having to give Mail.app a digital enema?
Any assistance would be most helpful - missing some but not all your incoming e-mail messages is quite annoying, as you can guess...!
Thanks,
Boz

Answer 1

Hello Boz.
This appears to be a rules issue. Mail is almost certainly downloading those messages, but they’re probably being processed by your rules in an unexpected way — given the information you’ve provided, maybe because there is something wrong with the file where the account settings are stored.
Do you have any Mail plug-ins? In the Finder, go to each of the following folders (if they exist). What do you see there?
/Library/InputManagers/
/Library/Mail/Bundles/
~/Library/InputManagers/
~/Library/Mail/Bundles/
To make accurately reporting this information easier, you may open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, type the following command (you can just copy it here and paste it in Terminal), and press <Return>. You can then copy the output of that command from Terminal and paste it in your reply to this post:
ls -1 /Library/InputManagers /Library/Mail/Bundles ~/Library/InputManagers ~/Library/Mail/Bundles
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Verify/repair the startup disk (not just permissions), as described here:
The Repair functions of Disk Utility: what's it all about?
After having fixed all the filesystem issues, if any, and ensuring that there’s enough space available on the startup disk (a few GB, plus the space needed to make a backup copy of the Mail folder), try this:
1. Write down your Mail > Preferences > Accounts settings or take screen shots of them.
2. If you have a .Mac account and .Mac synchronization of Mail data is enabled either in Mail > Preferences > General or in System Preferences > .Mac, disable it before proceeding.
3. Quit Mail.
4. Make a backup copy of the ~/Library/Mail folder, just in case something goes wrong while trying to solve the problem. You can do this in the Finder by dragging the Mail folder to the Desktop while holding the Option (Alt) key down, for example. This is where all your mail is locally stored.
5. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Preferences/. Locate com.apple.mail.plist and move it to the Desktop (to be deleted if this solves the problem). If you have a backup of your data that includes a working copy of this file, you may try restoring it from the backup to avoid steps 6-8.
6. Open Mail. You’ll have to set up your non-.Mac accounts from scratch all over again. If given the option to import existing mailboxes or something like that, don’t. Just enter the account information and Mail will automagically rediscover the data in ~/Library/Mail/ when done.
7. You’ll have to re-configure some of your Mail > Preferences settings. For spam-related security reasons, the first thing you should do is go to Preferences > Viewing and disable Display remote images in HTML messages if it’s enabled.
8. As a side effect of re-creating com.apple.mail.plist, Mail might rename Outbox (which is where messages waiting to be sent are stored) to Delivered. The name of that mailbox is actually a misnomer, as it would contain messages (if any) that couldn’t be delivered for some reason. You can delete that mailbox if you wish.
9. If the problem is fixed now and .Mac synchronization of Mail data was enabled at the beginning, enable it again, go to System Preferences > .Mac > Advanced, click Reset Sync Data, and choose the appropriate options to reset the Mail data stored on the .Mac server with the data locally stored on the computer, i.e. sync data must flow from the computer to the .Mac server.
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Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder. You can easily locate any of the folders referred to in this post by copying the folder path here, doing Go > Go to Folder in the Finder, and pasting the folder path there.