E-mail Issues

P

philsto

Registered
I have run into an issue with e-mail that will not delete. The offending piece of e-mail is in Mac Mail, it has an attachment, and can not be opened. Furthermore it can not be deleted, and causes the program to continually attempt to register/catalogue the piece of e-mail. It will not let the program quit, as it has unfinished business (unable to properly catalogue the mail), and will reappear, it seems, no matter what.

This is on a G4 running 10.3.9. I have tried removing plists, removing mailboxes (both within the application and by dragging the mbox to the trash), have run disk utility, Disk Warrior, etc, to no avail.

The other thing that happens is that it seems that when you delete the piece of mail (which appears three times wherever you see it) it seems to be deleted, but will magically reappear in the next mailbox that is selected...

I am guessing it's a corrupted piece of mail with a bad header, or s bad/corrupted attachment, and the mail program is stuck in a loop because it can not assimilate the piece of mail properly.

And that's all fine and logical, but how do I get rid of the piece of mail? Is it sitting in some spooling file somewhere, where i can physically remove it from?

Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks

Phil
 
Try this (it's someone else's suggestion, so I am not going to take credit for this if it works):

Quit Mail and go to Home > Library > Mail. Look for the folder with your account name on it. Open this folder and trash the INBOX.mbox file.

I am assuming you are using POP to retrieve mail. If you are using IMAP, the file to remove is INBOX.imapmbox.

Launch Mail and a new INBOX.mbox (or INBOX.imapmbox) file will be created automatically by Mail within the account named folder the next time you retrieve mail.
 
Before trashing the inbox a solution that worked for me in a similar situation was to click on a message just before the offending message and shift click on a message just after it and then hit Delete. That way Mail makes no attempt to open the message, it just gets zapped out of the inbox.
 
Thank you both, I will not be able to try this as I will not see the particular computer for a few days, but will definintely try then...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top