Running Mail with Mavericks....................started a new sub mailbox/folder , moved into it 4 messages of great importance with more to follow over coming months. The messages are listed but the content has disappeared. By way of confirmation, when composing a 'dummy' reply to any of these messages the pro forma comes up with "a n other wrote on xyz saying".........then the follow on is blank.
A further Mailbox folder was created and this accepted and displayed any new messages and content.
Attempts to move the "blank" messages out of the offending place to the new folder failed as "an error".
Moving the message from the second box to the offending first , succeeded including content but then within 10 mins the content disappeared. And it couldn't be moved back to the working location.
I still have Applecare,so.................. but Apple were non-plussed and sought more time to think about "this odd event".
However whilst they conferred I renamed the offending Mailbox/Folder and the content of all messages was restored. So Phew. Fingers crossed hope they won't disappear again.
POP. Because of the problem of setting up BT to process mail addressed to domain name account this was the route adopted at the time. Although I have a smart-phone (not Apple) i haven't started using it for web-browsing yet. You probably don't recall the problems "we" had getting things set up and we shied away from imap at the time.
John, I had this problem some weeks back. In my case it was a large 'for filing' mailbox with several thousand messages in it. I tried re-naming it and a few other tricks found on the forums but in the end only got it sorted by restoring an earlier version using Time Machine.
It does seem to be a problem with Mail getting some corruption in its database. In my case Mick, the messages were incoming and sent messages from three or four accounts, some IMAP! some POP, but the mailbox they had been moved to was in the 'on my Mac' section.
A week or so later, I discovered that all my contacts had vanished so had to resort to time machine again. Pre-mavericks, I have never had recourse to Time Machine at all so this OS does seem a bit more flaky than most, at least for me. And to answer Euan's inevitable question, yes I admit I did install Mavericks via Sofware Update and didn't do a Clean install. I did make and test a bootable clone before doing the upgrade though, so hopefully it won't be considered a hanging offence!
Thanks Mick for drawing my attention to this option, of which I was unaware.
I note that when one rebuilds, ".......locally stored messages are discarded, and the messages and attachments are downloaded from the server...." . Clearly I must not lose anything, but what if the messages are more than a month old and thus already erased at the ISP's end?
On this occasion, all seemed to have been restored by renaming the box, but I would like to understand the implications if I need to resort to do a rebuild in the future.
I don't understand the discarded bit - I've rebuilt mailboxes (POP accounts) in the past and never lost anything. My Mail is set to delete from the server immediately after download so there's never anything there to download again!
For safety, you could make a copy of your mail by copying (NOT moving! Hold down the Alt key while you drag.) ~Library/Mail and ~Library/Mail Downloads to you desktop. Quit Mail before dragging. Rebuild your mailbox and if it all goes wrong, just delete the old, damaged folders from ~Library and drag the destop versions back.
John Nicholas 