iCloud email account behaving strangely

[edward75]

Lately, I've been getting strange behaviors on my iCloud emails in the Apple Mail app when running in both my 2018 Mac Mini or my 2020 MacBook Air. First, when I delete my iCloud emails, it will reappear in my Inbox after a few seconds and when I try to delete it again, this time, it will try to go back to the Inbox again but this time I'll get a popup error message saying "The message could not be moved to the mailbox “iCloud”. Mail was unable to open this mailbox on the server “p48-imap.mail.me.com”. The server returned the error: Server Busy. Please try again later. (took 9 ms)" but still the email will reappear on my Inbox.

Another strange behavior is when I try to move some of my email to a folder I created under my iCloud email account, I get this popup error message saying "The IMAP command “APPEND” (to folder) failed with server error: Server Busy. Please try again later. (took 6 ms).". My Macs are running Catalina 10.15.5.

I tried disabling my iCloud account and re-enabled it, it didn't work. I tried the Rebuild function but that didn't work either. My Gmail or my Yahoo email accounts on my Apple Mail app are working fine and so I'm not sure what's going on. Any help or advise will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

[chscag]

Welcome to our forums.

Try accessing your iCloud mail account directly by signing on to iCloud with your Apple ID and password. Once your account is displayed, access your iCloud mail account and check to see if you can move the mail to the various folders you've set up.

 

[edward75]

I don't get the same problem on the iCloud website but it's inconvenient for me to use the iCloud site, it's very slow and not reliable plus I need to move some of emails from my Gmail to the iCloud folders I created and I can't do that on the iCloud site. I'm on the phone right now with the tech for 2 hours now and they stil couldn't figure out what's going on.

 

[ferrarr]

You could always forward the email from your gmail account to your iCloud account. That is probably what is causing the issue, since you are attempting to move an email from one provider to a different provider.

 

[edward75]

You could always forward the email from your gmail account to your iCloud account. That is probably what is causing the issue, since you are attempting to move an email from one provider to a different provider.

Thanks, I probably should have mentioned that I'm having the same problem within my iCloud email account, moving emails to a different folder in my iCloud, not just from a different email provider. So yes, after about 3 hours, "Apple Genius" couldn't figure out what's wrong so they're going to have their Engineers take a look at my problem and do a little more research and will get back to me. And today, it got worst. You know when an email is unread, there's that blue dot indicator, usually when I click on that email message, the unread indicator will disappear but now it disappears for a second and then it will go back to unread, and then now I will also get that same popup error message per my original post when I was moving email to a different folder. Oh well. Let's hope Apple figures out what's going on.

 

[Barry Woodward]

Thanks, I probably should have mentioned that I'm having the same problem within my iCloud email account, moving emails to a different folder in my iCloud, not just from a different email provider. So yes, after about 3 hours, "Apple Genius" couldn't figure out what's wrong so they're going to have their Engineers take a look at my problem and do a little more research and will get back to me. And today, it got worst. You know when an email is unread, there's that blue dot indicator, usually when I click on that email message, the unread indicator will disappear but now it disappears for a second and then it will go back to unread, and then now I will also get that same popup error message per my original post when I was moving email to a different folder. Oh well. Let's hope Apple figures out what's going on.

Hi Edward - did they ever figure out what was going on as I'm just getting exactly what you describe here happening on my iCloud email account - including today the blue 'Unread' dot is now reappearing

 

[MacInWin]

Welcome to the forum. You tagged onto a thread that is two years old. You may or may not get any response from Edward. And since nobody has posted a resolution, there may not be one. I occasionally see a persistent unread dot, but they go away after a while.

 

[Barry Woodward]

Welcome to the forum. You tagged onto a thread that is two years old. You may or may not get any response from Edward. And since nobody has posted a resolution, there may not be one. I occasionally see a persistent unread dot, but they go away after a while.

Thanks MacInWin.
Well as it happens whilst following some other posts about the same issue I tried to sign into my iCloud account on a browser to check for the same email behaviour there.
But I couldn't even log in: I got the message "iCloud encountered an error while trying to connect to the server".
Just to eradicate the possibility there was a problem my end I decided to run Disk Utility from the Recovery partition (Apple-R while booting up from restart).
And Lo! Having run First Aid on all the partitions of my start up disk AND the overall container, when I rebooted the problem has gone away!
(So to recap: I can now move emails to the Trash, read emails and lose the bold text and the blue dot staus indicators, AND I can sign back into my iCloud with a browser (actually Google Chrome)

 

[MacInWin]

Reboots are magic!

 

[Barry Woodward]

Reboots are magic!

I suppose it could have been just the reboot - but I did run Disk First Aid too
TBH I do run that if I ever do restart - I think it's probably best practice
I grew up on Macs running Norton Utilities all the time so a little regular maintenance has always been part of my user philosophy!