Rebuilding a mailbox on Mail 1.3.11

[1marcolino]

I was using OS X 10.3.9 in Mail 1.3.11 on my wife's computer. There are several mailboxes on the e-mail account. I was not able to get my mail from my mailbox, only saw some italic script telling me to go online to get my mail. I was already "online" so I went on and off and on again and nothing changed. So I noticed the "rebuild" option and clickd on it, not sure what it might do but it sounded promising. Well all the email in my inbox disappeared and around 12,000 others that my wife and I shared. Can I recover them?

 

[edadams]

Hi
Ahhhhh the old Panther mailbox overstuffed issues, yes its a known issue that can only be solved by using this utility-
http://www.analogueltd.com/mboxbreaker.zip
Backup your /Users/yourusername/Library/Mail folder to another location like your desktop.
Unzip the file above and run the enclosed applescript, follow the onscreen instructions.
I have not had this script fail me once, it will split your too large mail boxes into smaller ones that can be accessed again.
I did not write this script but found it years ago when I ran into the same problem and I keep it around now for my clients who are still on Panther.
One thing I always tell my Panther clients, try to keep your mailboxes, especially Inbox and Sent ones to under 1000 messages each or 1GB in size, if you go over that you will probably experience the 'message has not been downloaded from server'
Yes the builtin rebuild in Mail does not work very well, even to this day on Leopard, cmon Apple get it right.
Ed