Apple Mail shows incoming mail, but nothing arrives in inbox or any folders

Question

Apple Mail frequently shows incoming messages in the Mail Activity window, but nothing will arrive in my inbox or any folders. Am I missing messages?

I'm now using OS X 10.6.3, Mail 4.2 but this also happened with OS X 10.5.8/9.

Should I be worried?

Solution 1

A couple of things spring to mind:

Are there any messages in your spam/junk mail folder? These might be triggering the incoming mail message but then as they're moved straight away you don't see them.

Do you have any filters (or whatever they're called in Apple mail) active that move messages to other folders? This is less likely given that you state you've checked other folders. (I've seen this behaviour in Outlook for that reason.)

Solution 2

You probably have a corrupted Envelope Index. This can be corrected by deleting the index from /user/myaccount/library/mail or by going to Terminal and running the following command:

/usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum

In both cases, you'll want to ensure that you quit Mail first. It also may help to choose "Rebuild Mailbox" from within Mail.app if you continue to have problems.

Solution 3

If your on 10.9 Mavericks the path is now :

/usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Envelope\ Index vacuum

This worked for me.

Comments

[David]

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