Why do my Mac Mail smart folders keep disappearing

Each time I shutdown and restart my computer there seem to be a different listing of smart folders that are available. I've moved and stored important emails in these folders and when they appear at random, it is hard to perform normal business functions.
Thank you!
Jason

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Mac Mail Smart Folders triplicate messages (Gmail-based mail server)

I can't get Mail Smart Folders to work well with my Virginmedia mail server, which seems to use a Gmail type of system. (I'm using IMAP).
It is easy to set up an instruction to select mail e.g. from defined individuals only, or any other qualifier.
However, I get all mail in triplicate: from the normal Inbox, but also from Gmail-type "All Mail" and "Important" inboxes. I know these mailboxes exist on the Virginmedia server, and also, virtually, in Mail, but I don't ever look at them or need to. There might be a way of not having all mails defined as "Important" on the server, but "All Mail" exists by default and can't be removed, for obvious reasons.
I have tried various additional instructions in the Smart Folder such as include if "Message is in Inbox", but that selects all messages. Also, if "Message is not in Inbox", so that I get only two sets of messages, but that has produced strange results such as messages marked as in Spam folder, which seem to have nothing to do with the defined instructions.
Is there anything "smart" I can do about this, or is it just a matter of Mail not being up to speed with Gmail-based servers. It's just an annoyance, more than anything.

Nope. Gone.
I went to my second mac. Opened Mail, it refreshed its previous state, with 1100 messages in the Inbox, I was relieved and while thinking about my backup options, Mail started its new activity cycle and POOF....Gone. One test message in the Inbox.

Mail Smart Folders across accounts / between Macs

OS X Mail Smart Folders are very useful, but I have one problem:
My "Unread" folder between accounts and Macs has two criteria: Unread, plus on one account, not in a certain Inbox. Now, the mail account that I use for that 2nd criteria is only set up for use on one account. I have 2 accounts on my Mac Pro and 1 account on my MBP. When I check my Mail Unread folder on the other account and other Mac, the Unread folder syncs across iCloud, but since that email account I use for the 2nd criteria is not set up (active) on the other account / Mac, the Unread folder essentially breaks. If I edit it, then it breaks on the other user account where that 2nd criteria is effective.
Does that make sense? Anyone else having iCloud Mail Smart Folder sync issues across accounts / Macs?
Running OS X Yosemite all up to date on everything.

iCloud does not support or sync Smart Mailboxes or local folders. You can create mailboxes at the iCloud.com site that will be IMAP and show in the Mail sidebar under the iCloud folder. Those will show up on all devices.
Other than that, iCloud will only sync Mail's main mailboxes (default mailboxes).
In Addition to better explain:
Local folders under On My Mac are folders only located on the computer. They are not part of any IMAP or Exchange account.
Smart Mailboxes are for the most part just search engines. Messages are not stored in those, but they merely point to messages which actually reside in the original mailbox where they are stored.

I lost mail smart folders on iMac after delete them on Mac Air

I lost mail smart folders on iMac after delete them on Mac Air with differents mail accounts.
I don't undestand, I have email accounts totally differents between iMac and Mac Air, I don't know if is an iCloud issue.
When I open Mail on Air I see a lot of smart folders I use on iMac and I thinked of a some old sync mismatch, so I deleted smart folders on Air.
Today when I turn on my iMac I see I lost ol my smart folders, but are differents computers, differents email accounts, one used for work the other at home (gmail).
Of course I have time machine backup but don't know how to restore smart folders.
Please help me, I don't want smart folders be synced beetween differents accounts
I attach my iCloud settings...

I don't know the answer to your question, but smart folders do not actaually contain messages, just links to messages from other folders. So nothing has actually been lost. Once you recreate the smart folders, you'll see the same mail inside them that you did before.
Matt

In Mac mail, getting folders to line up alphabetically?

In Mac mail, my folders are not lining up alphabetically. Some are and then when you create a new folder it will place it in the middle of the list of folders and not in the alphabetical order. Any help would be appreciated.

Sounds like you had the "Keep Arranged by" option set. To access that in Snow Leopard the most reliable method is to click on the Desktop, then go to the View menu, and press the Option key--you'll see Arrange By change to Keep Arranged By. Using the Contextual menu method (doing a right click while on the Desktop) and then pressing the Option key might work....but my experience has been a bit confusing. Sometimes it seems like the choice doesn't "stick" or it reverts or something. Bringing up View Options won't get you the "Keep Arranged" option.
Francine
Francine
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My mac mail on just keeps sending the same messages even after deleted and shows thousands of emails supposed to be coming in

My mac mail on just keeps sending the same messages even after deleted and shows thousands of emails supposed to be coming in

If you have a backup, you can restore the e-mails. Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Library/Mail/V2.
Thanks to leonie for some information contained in this.

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For a couple of years now my wife's Mac Mail programme has from time to time stopped getting most of the emails sent to it for a week or more. I've wasted many hours on the phone to our service provider without ever getting to the bottom of the problem. Now I believe I know what's been happening. It seems that her Mail preferences keep turning on the SSL option without any human involvement. Apparently emails sent to an SSL selected email address will only make it into her in-box if they come from an SSL selected mail programme. Yesterday, scratching my head as to why, once again, few emails were getting through, I once again looked at the preferences and noticed that the SSL option, which I had recently unchecked, was once again checked. I unchecked it. It immediately re-checked itself. I unchecked it. It immediately re-checked itself. And so on, for ten minutes when, suddenly, it remained unchecked.
Why is this happening? My wife never, and I mean never fiddles with settings on her computer and nobody else uses it. The checking of the SSL option is being done entirely at the behest of the machine itself. Can anybody tell me how this could be happening? And could anybody tell me how I can stop it from happening again?

Back up all data. Don't continue unless you're sure you can restore from a backup, even if you're unable to log in.
This procedure will unlock all your user files (not system files) and reset their ownership and access-control lists to the default. If you've set special values for those attributes on any of your files, they will be reverted. In that case, either stop here, or be prepared to recreate the settings if necessary. Do so only after verifying that those settings didn't cause the problem. If none of this is meaningful to you, you don't need to worry about it.
Step 1
If you have more than one user account, and the one in question is not an administrator account, then temporarily promote it to administrator status in the Users & Groups preference pane. To do that, unlock the preference pane using the credentials of an administrator, check the box marked Allow user to administer this computer, then reboot. You can demote the problem account back to standard status when this step has been completed.
Triple-click the following line to select it. Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C):
{ sudo chflags -R nouchg,nouappnd ~ $TMPDIR.. ; sudo chown -Rh $UID:staff ~ $_ ; sudo chmod -R u+rwX ~ $_ ; chmod -R -N ~ $_ ; } 2> /dev/null
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V). You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.
The command will take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear, then quit Terminal.
Step 2 (optional)
Step 1 should give you usable permissions in your home folder. This step will restore special attributes set by OS X on some user folders to protect them from unintended deletion or renaming. You can skip this step if you don't consider that protection to be necessary, and if everything is working as expected after step 1.
Boot into Recovery by holding down the key combination command-R at startup. Release the keys when you see a gray screen with a spinning dial.
When the OS X Utilities screen appears, select
Utilities ▹ Terminal
from the menu bar. A Terminal window will open.
In the Terminal window, type this:
res
Press the tab key. The partial command you typed will automatically be completed to this:
resetpassword
Press return. A Reset Password window will open. You’re not going to reset a password.
Select your boot volume ("Macintosh HD," unless you gave it a different name) if not already selected.
Select your username from the menu labeled Select the user account if not already selected.
Under Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs, click the Reset button.
Select
 ▹ Restart
from the menu bar.

Why the mail smart folders don't show the email?

Suddenly (as it looks to me) any smart folders of Mail show their email; someone does have anything to suggest?

Go to Mail > Preferences > Accounts and use the minus sign "-" at the bottom to remove any and all accounts that you don't want in Mail.

Smart folders keep resetting

Hi everybody
I have made a number of smart folders but they keep resetting the rules that I have made for the folders.
I have a suspicion that it happens every time I sync. with my .mac account. But I am not sure.
Doe’s anyone have a good suggestion that can solve my problem.
Best
Lars Kudsk

Hi Kudsk .
Yes, this looks like a .Mac syncing issue.
First of all, in Address Book do File > Back up Address Book, just in case something goes wrong while trying to solve the problem. It wouldn’t be the first time someone loses his/her entire Address Book because of syncing issues.
Now, set up things the way you want, then go to System Preferences > .Mac > Advanced, click Reset Sync Data, and choose the appropriate options to reset the 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.

Mac Mail Smart Folder to organize HR applications?

hi all.
i am looking at purchasing filemaker for our business and am wondering if this might not be more easily solved WITHIN Mac Mail.
one problem we have is with incoming resumes and portfolios via email. normally this is an EMAIL and a COVER LETTER (doc or pdf) and a PORTFOLIO (in pdf format). i am wondering if there is some step by step instructions or perhaps some help or ideas that we should look at on how we might organize this info in Mac Mail or if it makes more sense to try to do this in FileMaker or even something else like one of the Devon products.
right now we are printing these out and it is really inconvenient.
a couple items i am noticing is that the FILENAMES of the attachments do not always have the applicants name in it and the cover letter is not always a separate file but is sometimes in the /body/ of the email (we currently use Mac Mail and Sparrow). also, while in the past we have tried to organize pdf's on the HARD DRIVE after we have downloaded it, /most/ of the incoming emails do in fact have a HEADER in the email that associates the applicant with the JOB POSITION. this would help a great deal in the sense that if we could use this it would "pre-sort" the applicants and we could then SORT FURTHER by adding tags or information after the information was already in a database.
any help would be appreciated.
TIA

hi. thanks.
i have two problems with this.
the first is that the emails that came in do not have any particular identifying information in them and there are emails for at least a year but probably going back three years. i don't want to have to search through all my emails in order to find these. i want to organize them in my computer instead of having them organized in paper as they are now.
so if i could get into an attachments folder i could take them out and cross reference them against the paper versions once i grab them. this would be much easier than searching for them one by one i think. i mean, i should start a new thread for this question but i also have .doc files and likely other files and Mail Search does not seem so robust.
so. once thing i was wondering with the post was whether there was a way to sort these as they COME IN and moving forward have filters set up to catch them. this way if someone does not put the correct header on the mail (i.e. they are not paying attention) their email does not go into the folder but if they do their email does go into this folder and this way i have an /automated/ way of keeping up moving forward.
so #1 would be to figure out a way to get caught up (finding where Mail stores attachments if i can access them would be of help) and #2 would be to find a way to sort these automagically. i have posted to FileMaker to see if FileMaker can find these emails and portfolios as they come into Mail but the more i think about it the more helpful it would be to sort them when they come in as email attachments.
it is sort of a nightmare to find these and sort them even moving forward in "real time".
THANKS

List view status of flagged messages in Yosemite Mail Smart Folders

I'm using Mail in Yosemite with an Exchange server. Before Yosemite, everything was fine, now I have an issue with message flag status in Smart Folders. I have a Smart Folder which is my "ongoing" mail folder; it is set to only show unread and/or flagged messages. In the latest version of Mail, setting the messages flagged status does not change the flag icon in the message list, but does in the header of the actual mail message. The only way to get the flag to show up in the list is to select another folder and then reselect the smart folder. It does this on both my MacBook Pro and iMac, with with the latest Yosemite version and all updates applied.
In the previous OS X Mail (Mavericks) changing the flag status would remove/add the flag icon in the message list pane; now it doesn't. It's insanely annoying.
Anyone else seen this bug? I have tried recreating the smart folder and that makes no difference, neither has rebuilding the mailbox/deleting index/envelope file. No changes have been made to our Exchange server.
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I can't find my mac mail email folders I need to get to them. Please help.

I use mac mail and had some folders in there to organize my emails. I clicked on my computer the other day to use the mouse and they disapeared. I have no clue where they are. I am pretty sure they aren't deleted because no ther confirmation came up making sure I wanted to delete anything. I beleive they are hidden somewhere but I can't figure out how to get them back. Please help I need info out of them.

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I have to adjust the column widths often -- otherwise they bounce back.
I have this in the Inbox, not just Smart Folders.

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Long story short - I need to save a backup copy of my mail folders which I think I've done, then reset mac mail & load the saved folders back into mac mail.
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Why do my Mac Mail smart folders keep disappearing

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