Mail Problem with Exchange after Crash

Running latest Mail on Lion 10.7.4 and all that.

Back in May Mail had a crash and when I reopened it all of my mail from my exchange account was missing. It is still there if I access the account through webmail, and all new messages since the crash go to Mail just fine. However, I can't get all the rest of my inbox from before the crash. This is really annoying because if I want to search for something from before the crash I now have to go to webmail instead.

I also have two gmail accounts and nothing bad happened with them, all the mail is accessible.

I have tried deleting the mail account and setting it up again, but it seems that when I do this I don't really delete all the emails from my computer because it loads all the emails right away when I setup again without having to download them all.

Any suggestions on how to get the rest of my mail from the exchange server? Is there maybe a more real way to delete an email account from my computer so that the mails all get deleted and then mail will actually try to load the whole mailbox when I reinitialize it?

Thanks,
Ravi

In ~/Library/Mail/V2 you should see the mail account data. Remove the account then the corresponding data.

Even after deleting the mails, and resetting my account with mail, I end up with only emails after May 18 (when Mail crashed). Further, it still seems to download them much faster than when regular mails are downloaded.

Any other ideas?

Try deleting the following

~/Library/ApplicationSupport/Mail/OnlineAccountTypes/com.apple.updated.mailaccounts

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist and plist.lockfile

Delete the whole ~/Library/Mail folder if you need to.

~/Library/Caches/com.apple.mail

Okay, now I seem to have the same effect I had before. It no longer loads emails from before the moment I did all of that, but I am getting new mails now. So somehow the mail account can no longer get the cached mails, but it thinks that it has them so it doesn't inquire to get all the previous mails from the exchange server.

-Ravi

I missed a folder,...

Check this out.

mail.app - How do I reset Apple's Mail, in Lion, to default settings? - Apple

Thank you very much, the issue is finally resolved. Just some info if anyone else is ever reading this thread and needs to get this to work. I tried it once without closing Mail when I was deleting all the files and it didn't work. So the steps should be:

1. Quit Mail
2. Remove all accounts from Mail, Contacts, Calendars in System Preferences
3. Delete all the files as shown in the link above
4. Re-enter all accounts

The only slight downside is that I had to fix all my mail preferences again, but it was worth it to have my full inbox in mail again.

Thanks again for the advice!

-Ravi