Mail

Beth

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Please help. My mail is totally messed up. The mail program didn't close properly one day when I shut down my computer. When I turned it on again, it looked as if I had lost everything in my mailbox. I did notice that the mailboxes on my hard drive have large numbers of MB, so I guess the mail messages are still somewhere on my hard drive.
In the meantime, whenever I open mail, I get a message saying that my mailbox is locked, do I want to open it anyway or quit or open read only. If I click on open anyway, sometimes the messages come pouring in, sometimes they don't. The counter says I have more than 3000 emails, but they're not actually in my mailbox. At the top of the window, near the toolbar, it says "Opening mailbox..." When messages do finally come into the mailbox, I get three copies of the same messages instead of just one. If I highlight one to delete, it will delete the message, then the next two messages are highlighted. If I delete those two, then all three messages show up again, and then sometimes every other message may be highlighted. When the messages show up this second time, sometimes I can read the message, and sometimes I get a message saying that the message hasn't been downloaded from the server, and that I need to take the account online in order to download it when I'm already online.
I'm having problems sending too, and it's not downloading mail from one of my accounts because it says the server doesn't recognize the password, even though the password is correct.

Thanks in advance. The reply doesn't have to be super simple, but please don't make it too technical either.

Beth
 
First of all, quit Mail and find the Mail preference file in your user folder…

[Hard Disk]/Users/[your user folder]/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

Drag this file to the desktop and re-launch Mail. If this doesn't fix the problem, try some System maintenance…
Put the install disk in the drive and re-boot. As soon as you hear the chime press and hold the "C"-key to boot from the disk. You will be presented with the installer window. DO NOT PROCEED TO INSTALL but go to the Installer menu and choose DiskUtility (you may have to select your language first).

In the new window click on the First Aid tab. Select your hard drive from the list on the left and then click on Repair permissions. Most likely you will get a few “Permissions differ on…” messages. When finished repeat this process until you get no “Permissions differ…” messages or the only messages are “We are using special permissions…” which can safely be ignored.

Once done click on Repair disk on the right to make sure any disk errors will be fixed. If any errors are detected repeat this process until no errors are reported. Now re-start your computer and open Mail.
This often resolves many issues in OSX and should be tried routinely whenever you have problems. How did that go?
 
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