Mail tries endlessly to download hundreds of messages

My mobile.me (mac.com) mail account will no longer successfully download new mail to my laptop; it claims to be downloading hundreds of messages (whereas the real number, as shown when I get my mail online at mac.com, is about 40) at download speeds of 1 k or less per second. The download proceeds to nearly the end then hangs up on a message and just spins its wheels. Cannot quit Mail, have to force quit, and when I re-open it the same thing occurs with a different number of supposed messages.
Sometimes the number of messages increases by several hundred during the attempted downloading.
None of the allegedly downloaded messages appears in my (laptop) inbox, nothing new there since yesterday. The "real" mail shows up in my online mailbox at mobileme.
The system continues to run ok, other programs are ok.

SSo what changed today that the photo suddenly decided it needed to download these messages again. Why doesn't a message deleted in the iPhone immeduately reappear in the iPhone or reappear 10 minutes later? Why were they gone one day and then reappeared the next? The behavior yesterday was different from the behavior today. Yesterday I would delete a message from the inbox and it would go to the trash. It didn't redownload. Why today did it decide it suddenly needed to redownload a thousand messages? What changed? The date?

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Mail program will not download any Gmail messages

Hi,
I have 5 email accounts set up through my mac Mail program. 2 are Gmail and I have not been able to download any messages since Saturday. All 3 other accounts send and receive fine. I was able to send messages from both gmail accounts.
My iPhone is picking up mail from both accounts. I've checked my Gmail settings and they seem to be correct.
Any ideas?

Hi Jenna,
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 these 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.
If that doesn't do it and you can afford to redo all your Rules, try these & reboot...
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist.backup

IOS has suddenly decided to download hundreds of messages

It's just streaming downloading messages going back into last summer in groups of 250 messages. Have no idea what it's doing or why. They all seem to be from a GoDaddy POP account. I have 489 unread messages, and it's just started another 250 batch. Anybody know what's going on with the OS and how to stop it before it fills my phone?
Thanks.

SSo what changed today that the photo suddenly decided it needed to download these messages again. Why doesn't a message deleted in the iPhone immeduately reappear in the iPhone or reappear 10 minutes later? Why were they gone one day and then reappeared the next? The behavior yesterday was different from the behavior today. Yesterday I would delete a message from the inbox and it would go to the trash. It didn't redownload. Why today did it decide it suddenly needed to redownload a thousand messages? What changed? The date?

Mail downloading all 800000 messages from Yahoo

So I installed Mountain Lion and set up my Yahoo! Mail account so that I could receive incoming messages in notifications center and sync my notes to my iPhone. Now Mail says it is downloading all 800000 messages from my mailbox. I've had this account for like 10 years and I like to keep all of my messages. Is there really no way to limit how many messages Mail downloads? The iPhone does this fine. Since the account is IMAP too, if I delete messages in mail it deletes them from the server. I guess I'll have to make an archives folder and move stuff from my inbox there and not sync it.
Also, my notes are not syncing with my iPhone...My iPhone is set to sync to yahoo notes, but when I clicked notes for iCloud it made me set up a @me account. Do I need to update to iOS 5.1 for notes sync to work with my iPhone?

RGH!
So, I followed the advice on the other link (deleting the downloaded messages info file), and even deleted my whole sent messages.imapmbox and rebuilt it, but my computer keeps downloading all 7500 or so sent messages over and over (more or less every time I start up Mail after the computer has been shut down). The sent messages box keeps growing and growing until I rebuild. On my MBP the folder is 5GB or so, and currently the one on my (problem) MacPro is 14gb and will surely be bigger before the weekend is out.
Another thing: If I try to stop the messages from downloading (by clicking on the little 'x' next to the progress bar in the 'Mail Activity' window, then it just ADDS the 7500 messages again onto the total to be downloaded (meaning 15,000 messages downloading and the 22,500 if I try to cancel again)
This is highly frustrating, and potentially damaging to my system drive if I fail to keep tabs on the folder.
Please, any other ideas/suggestions?

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.

Tried to send too large a message - mail now not working

Hi,
We have a problem. We tried to send a message containing a number of high res. pictures from our .mac account. Clearly this was far too big to send. The message has not appeared in the sent box but is not shown in an outbox. We now keep getting an error message:
"Mail has undone actions on some messages so that you can redo the actions while online. Mail has saved other messages in mailbox “Drafts (Mac Account)” in “On My Mac” so that you can complete the actions while online.
Additional information: The connection to the server “mail.mac.com” on port 993 timed out."
Every time we get this message a copy of the email we tried to send appears in a drafts folder in 'on my mac'
We are not receiving emails onto the computer now although I have checked on my mobile me account and they are coming through fine to that - they are just not being downloaded to our computer.
How do I stop mail trying to send this email and where can i find it to do it. I considered deleting the account and re setting it up but we have loads of emails in our inbox and sent box that we don't want to lose.
Can anyone help?
Thank you

Greetings,
Don't even think about deleting accounts; it won't solve the problem and it will create a bigger problem for you.
If the mail is in your Drafts folder as the error message said, first you should look in Home/Library/Mail/<the name of your mobileme account>/Drafts.mbox/Messages and delete the message from there if you see it. Also check your online MobileMe account to see if there's a copy there and delete it, too.
Then try restarting Mail to see if your mail will start downloading to your Mac again.

My iPhone is not receiving mail but these messages continue to flash at the bottom of the screen: Checking for messages, Updated just now, checking for messages, etc. After a minute or so it will flash downloading 1 - 32 messages but nothing is received

My iPhone is not receiving mail but the following messages continue to flash over and over at the bottom of the screen: "Checking for messages, Updated just now, Checking for messages", etc. After a minute or so it will flash downloading 1 - 32 messages but nothing is received and then the "Checking for Messages," etc. starts back again. I turned the phone off for 30+ minutes and also tried to reset it, but the problem continues. Any ideas on how to solve the problem?

Double click the home button and swipe up the messages app to stop it, then open the app again. This pretty much completely stops the process and freshly opens it again, resolving problems at times. I have had this happen before as well on my iPad, I get a banner, check messages, and nothing new is there.
If that doesn't work, close the app like suggested above, but then restart the phone by holding down the home and lock button for 10-15 seconds until the apple logo appears.

Mail wants to re-download 1500 messages from my POP server

I tried the delete the "MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded2" file trick and it's not working... (I don't know why there's a number 2 at the end"
Everything's been fine with me and Mail.app for the few weeks I've been using it. Last week, however, I noticed that Mail could no longer tell me which messages had been Removed From my Machine (in order to delete them from the server).
Now, Mail wants to download all 1500 messages from my POP server. I noticed this only by accident in the Activity Viewer.
How can I slap Mail and tell it to only download previously un-downloaded messages?
Thanks!
Dual 2.3 G5 Mac OS X (10.4.3) Mail v2.0.5 (746/746.2)

I tried the delete the "MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded2"
file trick and it's not working...
What does "it's not working" mean? It seems to me that it's working pretty well. You deleted it, and now Mail downloads everything still on the server again, which is exactly what deleting that file accomplishes...
I don't know why there's a number 2 at the end
Because Mail 2.0 uses a different file than what Mail 1.x used. It was called MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded (without the 2) in Mail 1.x.
Everything's been fine with me and Mail.app for the
few weeks I've been using it. Last week, however, I
noticed that Mail could no longer tell me which
messages had been Removed From my Machine (in order
to delete them from the server).
I don't understand what you mean here.
How can I slap Mail and tell it to only download
previously un-downloaded messages?
By restoring the MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded2 file that you deleted previously.
Alternatively, you can choose Get Info (⌘I) from the Action menu located below the list of mailboxes in the main Mail window to open the Account Info window -- type "Account Info" in the search field of Mail Help for more information on this feature. This allows you to selectively remove any messages from the server without having to download them.

How can i prevent mail from downloading the same messages over and over again?

is there any way to prevent Mail from downloading the same messages over and over again? Mail has a minimum of "50 recent messages" to download, but i hate having to delete them every time i check for new mail! why doesn't the program remember if you have already downloaded a message, and suppress any subsequent downloads???

Same issue since Mavericks.

Mail won't stop downloading messages... and won't quit either...

It just started a few days ago. It has been working just fine, even after I upgraded to Tiger (which was several months ago, finally). Over the last few days, when I launch Mail.app, it downloads all the same messages that have been on the server since Friday and won't ever complete the download. It just spins and spins. SO, the messages are never officially retrieved and removed from my POP server (which is a setting I have turned on). If I force quit the app. Or even quit the process (which doesn't usually have any effect), I then relaunch Mail.app and it re-downloads all the messages. Now I have about 5 copies of all these messages. And I can't seem to just quit the app.
I read a post that involved trashing the inbox and reimporting it back in. I'm not sure if that is the approach here. OR, if I can infact, just delete a particular cache file or temp file, or something that might get the Mail.app un-stuck.
Any thoughts? Let me know if you need any more specifics.
Thanks!

Mail 1.x used MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded to keep track of which messages had already been downloaded from the server. Mail 2.x uses MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded2 for the same purpose. It could be that there is something wrong with that file, or with your Inbox, but it could also be that Mail is choking on some troublesome message on the server. Let's try this first:
1. Quit Mail.
2. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Mail/POP-username@mailserver/.
3. Move the MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded files to the Trash.
4. Move INBOX.mbox to the Desktop (don't trash it), to be imported later.
As a result or removing the MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded files, Mail will try to download everythng still on the server as if new. You can use the Account Info window first to remove from the server any messages you don't want to be downloaded again. In order to do that, choose Get Info (⌘I) from the Action menu (gear icon) located below the mailboxes list in the main Mail window -- type "Account Info" in the search field of Mail Help for more information on this feature.

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(99269)

In Mail I delete hundreds of messages. And moments later they are NOT in trash and all back in the Main Window. What can I do?

Mail is acting crazy.
It continues to download the same messages from years and years ago. I delete them.
Moments later they are all back. Haven't been deleted.
Suggestions?

Configuring OS X Mail For Gmail Without Duplicates
User Library folder has 112 GB...something must be wrong!
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Firefox claims that my e-mail in-box is full & cannot download any more messages, even after I have cleared the majority of the files from in-box, out-box & deleted box.

When I returned from holiday there were hundreds of messages waiting for me, but Firefox would only open the first few. Some that I tried to open just showed a balnk page, others showed a page of hundreds of lines of letters & digits. Every time that I open Firefox I receive the message that the IN-box is full.
I appear to be able to send messages, but not receive them.
I have spoken to Virgin Media who say that all messages can be accessed via another server(?) - e.g. Outlook Express, so it must be a Firefox problem!

Firefox doesn't do emails.
If your question is about the Thunderbird program then a good place to ask is at the MozillaZine Thunderbird Support forum.
That forum is better suited for questions about Thunderbird, this forum is aimed at support for Firefox.
See http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=39

Mail tries endlessly to download hundreds of messages

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