Mail.app inexplicably deleting messages

[Thursday, January 31st]

Mail.app may suddenly exhibit an issue in which messages dragged from one folder to another are inadvertently (apparently) deleted, or moved to an incorrect folder. The behavior is more likely with IMAP accounts and (based on reader reports) occurring more frequently under Mac OS X 10.5.x (Leopard).

MacFixIt reader Brett Gaspers writes:

"I moved the message out of my Inbox to another folder and the message was just plain not there. A Spotlight search could not find the message at all. [...] This only happens if you are moving a message from one folder to another [...] The other annoying bug that I frequently run into is that attempting to move a message from one folder to another produces a slide-out dialog stating that the message cannot be moved, so the message stays in the original folder [...] Tiger Mail had no such problems going against the exact same server."

In some cases, this issue may be due to corruption of the Envelope Index file. In order to eliminate the corruption, follow this procedure:

• Quit Mail.app
• Make a backup of the folder ~/Library/Mail in case something goes wrong.
• Drag the file ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index to the trash or another location.
• Remove any IMAP-based accounts from the folder ~/Library/Mail. They start with the prefix IMAP.
• Re-launch Mail, which will state that it needs to re-import mail, at which point it will rebuild the Envelope Index. Your IMAP mail will also be downloaded from the server again.

If you are experiencing a similar issue, please let us know.

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