Tiger Mail - Serious issues?

Question

Hi all,
I have just recently emigrated to Tiger from Panther and immediately found some weird issues with Mail 2. Reading the other posts in this forum led me think there might be something fundamentally erratic with the app itself.
I use email several hours per day at work, and if I loose my emails, I basically loose evertyhing and can start looking for another job.
Here's what I've got:
1) Frequently (several times a day) I loose sight of ALL emails in the Mail viewer window in ALL mailboxes. It seems I have no emails of whatsoever. However, I might get a text on the top of the mailbox viewer saying, like: "0 messages, 10 unread". When I relaunch the app, all messages are back again. Knock on wood.
2) When deleting messages from local mailboxes, they disappear instantly. They do not end up in the Trash - On My Mac mailbox, as I guess they should. I've read other people having erratic behaviour on deleting messages or emptying the Trash (messages randomly disappearing, etc). Is this a variation on the same theme?
3) Mail has stopped reading some of my email account passwords from the Keychain, but prompts instead me to write (and remember!) them everytime I launch the app.
4) When upgrading from Panther to Tiger and launching the Mail for the first time, the app is supposed to import all the old mailboxes and the messages residing in them, right? Well, this just didn't happen. I got two POP accounts and two local mailboxes, which had most, if not all, of their messages lost after the upgrade. All the IMAP accounts, however, were ok.
I still have the previous Panther system as a back up clone on a FW HD. I duplicated the original mailboxes on the Panther disk and re-imported them using the "Import Mailboxes" command in Mail. To my suprise the messages were still not imported. I got an inbox of 2000+ emails, for example, and I got about 100 of them imported. I started to become hysterical at this point. The issue was finally solved by importing the mailboxes by selecting the "Other" box in the import window as a source of data, instead of "Mail", and voila, all thousands of messages were appropriately rescued.
(Btw, luckily I had duplicated the original mailboxes before starting to import, as my first import attempts had deleted / emptied the source mailboxes, even though the contents were not appropriately imported. If I had been trying to import directly from the original mailboxes on the Panther clone (not from the duplicates), I would have lost my emails for good.)
I've got several mailboxes (over 10 accounts + local archive boxes), and as mentioned, the email app is the most important daily tool for me, notwhitstanding all that creativity that is going on here with all the other fancier apps.
I wonder if anyone could give a helping hand? Any suggestions how to repair Mail 2? Or if Mail is beyond repair, which other email app would be suitable for heavy pro use?
I'd hate to start using Entourage or the like, but this scary and disappointing experience with Mail 2 has made be consider going non-Apple. Regrettably so.
Thanks for any help!
jhv
PB G4 800   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

Answer 1

Hi jhv.
The conversion from Mail 1.x to Mail 2.x is broken. Take a look at the following thread to better understand the problem:
Help! "You need to take this account online in order to download it."
In particular, you may want to take a look at the following article (also referenced in that thread) to learn what you might have done before migrating to minimize the risk of this happening, and what you may do after fixing the problems to avoid similar issues from happening in the future. DON'T do now what the article suggests, though, as that would make things worse in the current situation:
Overstuffed mailbox is unexpectedly empty
Although it seems you've successfully imported your old mail, it looks like you've done that without fixing whatever was amiss in your Mail folder as a result of the failed conversion, and I bet it's all a mess now.
The following procedure is an example of how to fix conversion problems in the Inbox of a POP account. Similar procedures can be used to fix conversion problems in other mailboxes:
1. Quit Mail.
2. Make a backup copy of the ~/Library/Mail folder, just in case something goes wrong. You can do this in the Finder by dragging the folder to the Desktop while holding the Option (Alt) key down, for example. This is where all your mail is stored.
3. Create a new folder on the Desktop and name it however you wish (e.g. Inbox Old). It doesn't need to have an .mbox extension.
4. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Mail/POP-username@mailserver/INBOX.mbox/.
5. Move the mbox file out of INBOX.mbox and into the Inbox Old folder just created on the Desktop. This file contains all the messages that were in the mailbox before the upgrade to Tiger (maybe even some messages that had been deleted).
6. Move any strangely-named Messages-XXXXXX folder to the Desktop (not into the Inbox Old folder). These folders are to be deleted after fixing the problem. They are temporary folders created during an import or a re-indexing process, and Mail should have deleted them when done. Their presence is a clear indication that something didn't work as expected. If you've been using Mail after the conversion and have already tried to fix the problem by rebuilding the mailbox or something like that, they might contain messages that are neither in Messages proper nor in the mbox file, so keep them around until the problem is fixed.
7. Move everything else within INBOX.mbox, except the Messages folder, to the Trash.
The result of the above should be that INBOX.mbox contains the proper Messages folder only, and the Inbox Old folder on the Desktop contains the mbox file only. Now, proceed as follows:
8. Open Mail.
9. The account's Inbox should properly display in Mail as many messages as *.emlx files are in ~/Library/Mail/POP-username@mailserver/INBOX.mbox/Messages/. If that's not the case, select the mailbox in Mail and do Mailbox > Rebuild.
10. In Mail, do File > Import Mailboxes, choose Other as the data format, and follow the instructions to import the Inbox Old folder that's on the Desktop. Do with the imported mail whatever you wish. You may move to the account's Inbox the messages that Mail failed to convert properly, and delete those that did get through and, hence, are duplicates now.
The following collection of AppleScripts has a Remove Duplicates script that can be useful for removing duplicate messages:
http://homepage.mac.com/aamann/Mail_Scripts.html
If all is well and you're not missing anything, the files on the Desktop can be deleted, although you may want to keep them for a while, just in case.
Ask for any clarifications or if you need further assistance.
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user's home folder, i.e. ~/Library is the Library folder within the user's home folder.