[DEMUG] Apple Mail mailbox snafu (resolved)

[Dick Atlee]

Endless thanks to Matt MacGod Baya for solving this.  Another one of 
those cases of looking everywhere for something and not looking where 
the thing OUGHT to beL

      If you highlight a folder and then choose REBUILD from the
      MAILBOX menu, in a flash all the indexes for that folder and
      any subfolders are repaired and everything shows up as it should.

I won't even bother to try to figure out what corrupted the indexes in 
the first place...

Thanks, Matt!!!!

Dick

Dick Atlee wrote:
> 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
> 
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