Phantom Mail

I get mail marked "No Sender". I cannot erase them because it contains no message. They all have a posting date of 1969. How can I delete these phantom email?
Thanks: Jim Conroy

hi
sorry i have no ideas, other then i am in the same boat, + i am getting some messages which i received months ago with a different tittle then when they arrived before. very odd!!
alan

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Phantom mail notifications

I'm getting phantom mail notifications in Yosemite even after disabling "Sounds" for Mac Mail in the notification settings. I don't know of any other app using the same "Ding" but if they do I'm not noticing any changes when it dings. Mountain Lion had an issue where Mail notifications were delayed, especially with IMAP Gmail, but again, I have disabled sounds. Any ideas?

This appears to be the same bug that has affected Mac Mail with Gmail. Notification sounds appear late...minutes after you read the message.
You cannot simply turn off sounds in the notifications settings. You also have to go into Mail - Preferences and disable sound notifications there too.

Phantom Mail Messages

The "Drafts" folder in my Mail is showing an ever increasing number of messages which simply aren't there. The number of these messages is show in the usual way in the left hand side, folders column.
Does anyone know why it does this and how I can remove these phantom messages (if indeed they are).
Thank you

I had the same problem. In another posting I found this:
"One thing to look at would be whether Preferences > Accounts > Mailbox Behaviors > Store draft messages on the server is checked, and whether unchecking that (so that drafts are stored locally instead) makes a difference."
Bing - no ghost Draft messages.
Best,
MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Phantom mail retrieved

iMac 2011 with Mavericks. When retreiving messages in Apple Mail, Mail Activity says 9 of 9, or 8 of 8, when
in fact there are only one or two messages. This never happened with M Lion, only since upgrading to Mavericks.
Any clues?

This appears to be the same bug that has affected Mac Mail with Gmail. Notification sounds appear late...minutes after you read the message.
You cannot simply turn off sounds in the notifications settings. You also have to go into Mail - Preferences and disable sound notifications there too.

Phantom Mail unread

A lady at Apple Watford solved the problem facing many people who recently upgraded their operating system to OS7 wherby the Mail icon shows many unread items, in my case 8042. Her solution which worked is:
Open Mail in the normal way to look at your Inbox
Press Edit
Press Mark All
Press Mark As Read
All fixed!!

Try rebuilding the mailbox. This can take awhile if you have a lot of mail.
Rebuild mailbox
Try reindexing the mailbox. This can take awhile if you have a lot of mail.
Reindex messages

TS3899 I have 3000 + phantom mails in my inbox and cannot remove them ....Help

Does any one know how to get rid of 3000 plus phantom emails from my inbox, please help

Have you tried resetting your iPad?
Reset the iPad by holding down on the sleep and home buttons at the same time for about 10-15 seconds until the Apple Logo appears - ignore the red slider if it appears on the screen - let go of the buttons. Let the iPad start up.

Instead of "Mailbox busy", Mail asks for password, long delay

We're testing Mail as a replacement for Eudora at my place of work. There is a POP account (not .mac) that is checked by five people. Using Eudora 6.x, if one person was checking the account, anybody else trying to check would get a Mailbox Busy message. Using Mail, you'd get an alert symbol next to the mailbox in the mailbox list, but next time mail was checked and the mailbox wasn't busy, it would work fine.
We just switched to a new mail server yesterday (on a Vereo host?) and now, though Eudora is behaving as before if the account is busy, Mail will pop up a box saying the password wasn't recognized, asking for the correct password, and then there's a loooong delay while it times out.
I presume the new server is sending some kind of busy message that Mail interprets incorrectly, but it's a show-stopper for us. Currently our options are:
1. Stop using a shared mailbox (my personal preference, but the actual users might not go for it)
2. Find out from the provider why the new server is causing this behavior (fat chance--they're likely to blame it on our weird Apple software)
3. Find out how to make Mail interpret the busy signal correctly.
4. Forward the account's mail to all the users' own addresses, instead of having them check that account themselves (am doing this now, will see how it works out. It will require more storage space on the server, at a minimum.)
I'm trying to find out if the server supports IMAP but in any case that would not be a workable solution for us.
Any feedback or enlightenment would be greatly appreciated.
--Colleen
Mac mini G4 1.25 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

"More Like this" entry " Phantom Mail Account won't let go! Steven Shmerler SASNET Design, New York Oct 10, 2011 7:56 PM" gave me a clue, which after 15 minutes without annoying message, seems to work.
Went to Mail Preferences/ Accounts/ Account Information/ Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)/ Edit SMTP Server List...
There were four (count them, 4) references to Earthlink. I deleted them, restarted Mail, and so far so good.
Thanks

Mail's default mail account.

Hi, all.
After many frustrated incidents with e-mails being sent from the wrong account, I decided to (again) try to find a solution to this problem.
In Entourage, my previous e-mail client, the solution to this problem was to create a phantom e-mail account and set it up as the default account without the proper account settings. In this case one of two things would happen: (1) I would either remember to set the proper sending account in Mail before sending a message, or (2) in case I forgot Entourage would use the default e-mail account and this would generate an error message in which case I would be allerted to the need to set the proper sending account the resend the e-mail message.
Is there a way to avoid this problem in Mail ? Can I designate no account or a phantom mail account as the default?
Thanks in advance.

Hi, drdocument.
I don't think this solution would work for me because I have Mail set-up with multiple e-mail accounts.
What happens then when I need to change the server prior to sending a message?
Thanks for your help and reply.

Phantom messages appear in search results

Hello. When I search for a message in Mail, the search results often include three instances of the same message. One is the correct message. The other two, however, are phantoms. There is no mailbox listed for these phantoms, and if I click on a phantom in the search results window, nothing in the message pane, just a "show in mailbox" link. If I click on "show in mailbox" link for these phantoms, Mail does nothing.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this?
I'm using IMAP to a server at my university, so perhaps could this be a problem with the mail server?
Any advice is appreciated.

How long has this been going on? Are these "phantoms" messages that you deleted before and still showing up, or are they all the same message, with the same date and time?
Have you tried rebuilding your Mail index? It could be corrupted. To do that:
1. Quit Mail if it's running.
2. Go to Home/Library/Mail and remove (do not delete) the Envelope Index file(s) to your Desktop.
3. Restart Mail and allow it to import your existing messages. When that's finished, try searching for those same messages again and see if the phantoms still show up; you can also delete the Envelope Index file on your Desktop.
Post back with results.

Mail is still checking deleted account

occasionally I'll get an alert asking for the password for an email account which is no longer installed (it doesn't appear under the preferences > accounts window). Any idea why Mail keeps checking this account??

No, but if you don't mind writing down all of your valid account information (imap/pop and smtp server names, port numbers, SSL or not, etc.), you could quit Mail, temporarily drag your /Users/marckula/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist onto your Desktop (this is for just in case you don't like what you've done, you can restore your previous Mail configuration by just dragging it back), restart Mail, and recreate your desired account preferences from your handwritten notes by going through the (first-launch) Mail setup "Wizard." I would think that that would get rid of attempted logins to phantom mail accounts.
Or, you could try double-clicking on the /Users/marckula/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist to edit it if you're comfortable with using the Property List Editor (I think you might have had to have installed the Developer package first) or using "pico" inside Terminal.app to edit it if you're comfortable with using Terminal.app. I'd drag a backup copy of it to the desktop before editing it, though.

Earthlink Mail on 8130

Hello,
I'm having a bit of trouble configuring my Pearl 8130(Verizon Wireless) to access my Earthlink e-mail account. I've had no problems with GMail, but it doesn't allow me to setup the Earthlink account. Any suggestions?

"More Like this" entry " Phantom Mail Account won't let go! Steven Shmerler SASNET Design, New York Oct 10, 2011 7:56 PM" gave me a clue, which after 15 minutes without annoying message, seems to work.
Went to Mail Preferences/ Accounts/ Account Information/ Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)/ Edit SMTP Server List...
There were four (count them, 4) references to Earthlink. I deleted them, restarted Mail, and so far so good.
Thanks

Why dos my sent box show 140 emails when I have none?

My iPhone 5 seems to be having an issue with phantom mails, but unlike most of the questions across the forum, this relates to an empty sent box showing 211 emails (but it appears that there are none, and I have deleted all my previously sent messages).
Anyone?

My computer does this too. It also has made my Sent Button disappear and refers me to a "send later" solution. which is do not get or have. Shake the tree, maybe a nut will fall. Crack the nut and there you will find the Chinese answer!

Phantom Blank Spam blocking Mail from retrieving new mail in Apple Mail

Over the past few days my wife and I have both had difficulties downloading pop-3 mail from our accounts (from a UK based ISP, UKonline) onto our separate computers (Powerbook G4 and MacBook). I have no idea yet whether this is affecting other ISPs or other Mac or PC platforms or mail clients, but it is definitely affecting both of our Mail apps running under 10.4.7.
The problem seems to revolve around blank email messages being received into our respective accounts by at our ISPs mail server.
These blank messages, presumably some form of spam have no sender, no recipient, no date, no source code, no body text and no subject.
These 'phantom' blank emails appear to be the root of the problem as once they are manually removed from our server-side inbox (either through Apple Mail's 'Get Info' / 'Remove from Server' function, or via our ISPs webmail facility), the email starts picking up mail automatically again–immediately, without any other intervention other than clicking 'Get Mail'. Until they are removed, Apple Mail will NOT collect any more mail, automatically or manually through 'Get Mail'.
I have contacted my ISP and to date had no firm response from them. One of their operatives suggest I contact Apple as his Windows PC email still works and retrieves mail when these blank phantom messages reach his server-side inbox waiting to be collected.
The fact that these messages have no date means that under Mail's 'Get Info' / 'Remove from Server' facility, they always appear at the top with the CURRENT date and time when sorted by date. In this way, they are easy to spot. Also, if sorted by size, they also appear at the top because they are 0k in size. They appear to act as a blockage to receiving new mail until they are cleared.
I'd be grateful to hear if anyone else is having this problem or has found a solution to it, or indeed whether this is an ISP problem.
With thanks
Jamie
Powerbook G4 17" 1.67GHz & MacBook 1.83 Mac OS X (10.4.7) Macuser since 1987; Apple IIe veteran.

Hello Jamie.
These 'phantom' blank emails appear to be the root of the problem
as once they are manually removed from our server-side inbox
(either through Apple Mail's 'Get Info' / 'Remove from Server' function,
or via our ISPs webmail facility), the email starts picking up mail
automatically again–immediately, without any other intervention
other than clicking 'Get Mail'. Until they are removed, Apple Mail
will NOT collect any more mail, automatically or manually through
'Get Mail'.
What is your setting for removing messages from the server when downloaded by the Mail.app?
If set to right away, does this have any effect?
One of their operatives suggest I contact Apple as his Windows
PC email still works and retrieves mail when these blank
phantom messages reach his server-side inbox waiting to be collected.
Of course - especially if this operative is using Microsoft's Outlook or OE which usually don't have problems downloading anything including viruses, adware and spyware.
I'm not sure why these "Ghost" spam messages cause this problem with the Mail.app but these are obviously sent by a spammer to cause problems.
How about your ISP doing something about blocking all messages at the incoming mail server that are completely blank such as these so they don't arrive in any of their customer's Inbox mailbox at the server since these messages are intended to cause problems and are completely blank anyway? No different from any other type of spam or as messages are scanned for viruses at the server. Although Apple needs to look into this, your ISP is not completely off the hook or has no responsibility IMO.

Phantom GMail messages in mail.app

Here's my situation:
At one time I decided it would be lovely to point mail.app at my GMail account. I changed my mind about this pretty quickly (once I figured out that it was going to take approximately 11 years to download all of my gmail messages, since I rarely delete anything from gmail).
The "phantom messages" I reference in the subject line are these: references to gmail messages that do not exist on my machine. During the normal course of using mail, I don't ever see them, but they turn up by the thousands when I search for messages or when I create a Smart Mailbox. I'm starting to suspect that they may be implicated in some of the mail slowness that I have been experiencing, in particular slowness of Smart Mailboxes (which, ideally, I would like to use to organize my RSS feeds).
Here's what it looks like:
The little "Show in mailbox" text that looks like it ought to be a link is nothing - can't click it, can't highlight it, nada.
I have recently rebuilt ALL of my .plist files in an attempt to address the "mail won't quit" problem (the one that's NOT related to notes or mobile me - seems to have worked, by the way), so I know that's not going to solve the problem. When I look at /Library/Mail, there is no evidence of a GMail mailbox anywhere.
So. Does anybody know how I can get rid of these? There are literally tens of thousands of them - one search turns up over 16000 phantom messages. I can delete them, which makes them not show up in searches anymore. Interestingly, when I delete them they do NOT show up in my Trash... they simply vanish. So I could manually delete them all, but that would take a really long time.

Bump... anybody have any ideas on this one?

Can't find a 'phantom' unread mail or mark it as being read

I'm using mail on various machines to access an Exchange server account. It generally works with no problems, but on my work MacPro (and only on this computer not the iMac at home, various laptops, iPad, iPhone etc) mail tells me there is an unread message. However, I can't find this message and it's not there when I use a webmail interface to access the same account. No problem, I figured I could just right click on the mailbox and 'mark all messages as read', but this doesn't work! I like to keep a clear inbox with no unread messages and it's driving me nuts!
I'm guessing that there's some strange synching conflict, but don't know how to solve it. Any ideas, please?
Thanks, Jon.

I tried both, but neither has worked.
a) Rebuilding the mailbox revealed another unread mail that actually existed, but didn't remove the 'phantom'.
b) The SM trick uncovered lots of unread news items from Apple, but not the 'phantom'.
Thanks for your help, but I might need to do something more drastic like deleting the account and adding it again.
Thanks, Jon.

Phantom Mail

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