Problems with Apple’s Mail App, Messages ReAppear & seem to be self replicating

[Greg_ghp]

Problems with Apple’s Mail App, Messages ReAppear with Blue Dot Denoting that they are UnRead & seem to be self replicating in my "Mail" Folder. I hope I am putting this in the correct Forum, sorry if I am in the wrong place.

27" iMac Running OS X 10.9.5 using Mail Version 7.3, email account type POP.

I did a search for similar Mail problems and the only reference I found to my problem was in “switcher-hangout”
http://www.mac-forums.com/switcher-hangout/320714-confused-mail.html?highlight=email+problems

This member was having problems with Apple’s Mail App and he asked about a similar problem to mine, with the messages having been read and maybe even Deleted, reappearing with the Blue Dot Denoting that they are UnRead. My problem is compounded by the Appearance of Gigabytes of data/messages being generated in the “Mail” folder.

I had this problem before and to resolve the issue I just deleted the email accounts. At the time the problem didn’t effect my other email accounts. This time the issue is effecting my main mail account. I don’t remember what precipitated the first time but this time I had trouble getting an external drive to mount and my iMac hung up on restart with a gray screen so I did a hard shut down, waited a bit and then pushed the power button to start my iMac. All programs had been quit before the initial attempt to restart. The external drive did show up after the restart and I proceeded to copy files to it and everything seemed normal. But the next morning I noticed I had an extra 20 GB’s of data on my hard drive and in checking my Mail folder and noticed the increase in size of the accounts main folder.

I have had this and other POP email accounts for years and never had any similar issues with any of them until it happened to the accounts I deleted and now my main account.

Today I was shifting messages for back ups and noticed that things were taking a long time. I opened the Activity Window in Mail, one group of only 35 emails had 5800 messages and took 11.77 GB of disk space.

I noticed a notice in the Activity Window about “Indexing” 250, 300, couple times over 500. I didn’t think of it until later so I don’t have exact number and these later groups seem to have less repeated messages.

54 emails had 7966 messages and took 8.41 GB’s of disk space

54 emails had 883 messages and took 2.47 GB’s of disk space

I am thinking that since I have backed up all of these emails/messages, whatever they are, that I could go into my “Mail” folder and Delete en mass…

This problem shows up while I am trying to get my iMac down to less than 1 TB of used space so I can clone my hard drive and then up grade to OS X El Capitan


Greg

 

[ferrarr]

The POP system is where the issue is, I believe. That leaves the messages on the server, and the next time you open Mail, it downloads the message again.

 

[chscag]

The POP system is where the issue is, I believe. That leaves the messages on the server, and the next time you open Mail, it downloads the message again.

+1. Member ferrar is correct. You're either going to have to access the account via the web and delete the messages or go into your Mail options and select "remove mail from server after downloading".

 

[Ember1205]

I'll pile on here as well.

If your mail accounts offer access via IMAP, change to that. Even with multiple devices accessing the mailboxes, the experience is significantly smoother and cleaner if you do this via IMAP instead of POP (sometimes referred to as POP3).

I want to add some additional info, though, as ferrar's post isn't necessarily accurate as written. POP -allows- you to leave messages on the server but email programs always chose to REMOVE them from the server once downloaded. Newer systems may be opting to leave the messages on the server and rely on a local "database" in the mail program to understand which ones are old and which ones are new (to determine which ones to download). Regardless of which operating mode you're using, it's possible that something is corrupt in the email client and it's confused about what needs to be downloaded or not, deleted or not, marked read or not, etc. IMAP doesn't work this way as it's a more pure "sync" between mail client and mailbox, using the READ status stored on the message itself in the actual mailbox.

 

[Greg_ghp]

I want to thank you both for taking the time to respond to my post. Bob, you are right, there is an issue with POP Accounts in Mail, although I personally hadn't had a problem for years until it happened to me the first time last year, there IS an issue. "chscag" you also added another piece to the puzzle. Last night even after I found all those messages still on my server and deleted them, they kept showing up in my Inbox, with the unread blue dot...

Sometime early this morning the light bulb went off and reminded me that I had not, even after reading several times, to check my message server, duh!!! Even though I have been on a regular basis telling "Mail" to delete the messages on the server it seems that doing so isn't working anymore. So I deleted them manually on the server but as I said above they still kept re-appearing. This evening after reading "chscag" response, I changed my Mail setting to "Delete Immediately" after retrieving a message!!! AND it's working!

I still have a lot work to do to figure out what I can delete on my hard drive but at least the problem isn't still compounding itself.

So new question, hopefully those that are reading this post have the answer, What "Mail" folders on my hard drive can I delete. I figure of course not the top level account folders and the main folder for mail boxes I have created but can I just delete the folders that contain all the duplicate emails???

I see "Ember1205" has added some additional info that I will check into in the future.

I want to again, thank those of you who responded to my need for help. I am so glad I found the mac-forums site!!!


Greg

 

[Ember1205]

Greg,

When you're referring to mail folders on the hard drive, are you referring to what you see inside of the mail program or through Finder? I wouldn't touch anything in Finder, and what you see in Mail should "map" directly to what folders you have on the mail server. Don't delete folders that are on the mail server.

While you may have addressed this specific issue with the configuration change you made, you've now created a situation where your other clients will no longer be able to have the same list of messages on them as on your Mac. Once the Mac downloads and deletes the file, it is no longer available to the other clients. IMAP addresses this. I would encourage you to move looking into that up on your priority list.