Mail refuses to display body/attachments of sent items

Question

Hello apple support! I'm brand new to this community and I honestly come to these forums for help.
A coworker is having an issue with Mail 1.3.11 (v622) running on his Mac.
Whenever he attempts to view any items that are stored in the sent mail folder he cannot see the email. Instead he sees text at the top of the email that says:
"The message from X user<[email protected]> concerning “Re: email message name” has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it."
He says that he used to have no problems viewing any sent items but he began to encounter this bug quite a while back but usually closing the software and reopening it would allow him to work around the problem.
He has a POP email account setup and going online/going offline does not change a thing. His options show that incoming mail is to be deleted after 7 days of being on the server; and I cannot locate a setting for me to specify for sent items to be stored.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25812 This apple support html page seemed to be the solution upon first reading it, but my coworker got no luck out of trying these solutions. His problem is still there, he cannot read the text or attachments from his sent mail.
Thanks for any and all help.

Answer 1

You're welcome.
The recommended size limit for a Jaguar or Panther mailbox is 1GB and this mailbox is over 2GB in size.
To put this into perspective, Entourage stores ALL data in a single database and the database size limit for Entrouage X is 4GB and 4GB is for all messages and message attachments, address book contacts, calendars and to do's.
This single mailbox is over half the database size limit for Entourage X.
The manual procedure will not work on this mailbox due to its size.
Send me an email and I'll forward you an mbox breaker script that splits a mailbox into smaller sections to recover the messages. There is no guarantee with this script but it has worked well for others. If the script is not successful, it is likely all messages contained in this mailbox will be lost.
You can get my email address by selecting my name.
And tell your friend to follow the recommendations per the link you provided in your original post by utilizing user created "On My Mac" mailboxes to sort sent and received messages by category and use the Rebuild Mailbox function on a regular basis.
Before upgrading to Tiger, I didn't allow any mailbox to exceed 500MB or so in size, used the Rebuild Mailbox function on the most active mailboxes on a regular basis - once a month or so depending on activity and I never experienced an overstuffed mailbox issue or any problems.