[DEMUG] Apple Mail mailbox snafu

[Dick Atlee]

I'm trying to help out with an Apple Mail mailbox problem, and find 
myself hampered by the fact, although I've done a lot of helping with 
mail problems in many applications, I don't use Apple Mail and find that 
its file/folder storage approach doesn't behave like other programs with 
which I'm familiar.  Any help would be appreciated.

The problem arose when a mail folder was renamed from "Friends" to 
"FRIENDS".  (I don't know whether this new MacBook's system is case 
sensitive or not.)  This was done in a kind of overall-cleanup mode, not 
paying any attention to actual content until some days later.  I'm told 
that when the change was made, it appeared there were two folders, and a 
cursory look at the subfolder list seemed to indicate the two folders 
were duplicates, so one was deleted.  When I was asked for help, 
"Friends" didn't show up in Mail's folder list, and the usual pair of 
folders in the Library now was only one, the mbox folder.

A backup had been done since the change, but I found both Friends and 
Friends.mbox on the backup drive.  So I moved the existing Friends.mbox 
to the trash, and pulled the two backup folders into the 
Library/Mail/Mailboxes folder.  Friends then showed up in Mail's folder 
list, as did all its subfolders, but no messages appeared in the message 
list panel when any of them were opened (including Friends itself, which 
has 4 messages in addition to all the subfolders).  The messages are all 
present (numbered .emlx files in the Messages subfolder under each 
folder), and double clicking them will open them in Mail.  But for some 
reason the Mail app cannot see them.

In all other mail programs I've encountered, removing the index file for 
a mail "folder" forces a re-indexing, so that is the normal fix when 
things go awry in a message list.  In this case, though, removing the 
index files seems to do nothing but prompt the recreation of the generic 
info.plist file.  And the messages in these 40 or so subfolders are thus 
for all practical purposes unusable.

Is there any way to force Mail to acknowledge the existence of existing 
messages in folders?  Thanks for any help on this.

Dick