[Keda]

Last Friday I was sent a very large (25MB) attachment. At first, everything seemed fine. I got the email in my IMAP account (icon said attachment wasn't downloaded) and I went on about my business. I shut down the machine over the weekend. When I booted up today, my IMAP account seems to be stuck in some stage of synchronization.

I have tried to delete all traces of the attachment from my local machine and the gmail system. However, the messages and attachments reappear on my local machine after a few minutes. I've quit mail and restarted the computer.

Is there anyway to stop the synchronization? HItting the 'stop sign' icon has no affect other than making the text gray. Here is a screen shot of mail's activity. These rows have all been on screen for quite a while:

[mduell]

Mail.app + IMAP = Sync Train Wreck

[Simon]

IMAP = Train Wreck

[Cold Warrior]

log in to webmail and make sure it isn't there somewhere. Now launch Mail and (probably) right-click your mailbox and choose to refresh msg list, or choose it from a menu. This may force refresh the list.

Otherwise I'd try to wait it out, maybe overnight. Mail is a crappy imap client anyway.

[Keda]

I lost patience, and reverted to a time machine backup from before the message arrive. First, I deleted the offending message from the server.

The most frustrating part of this was the lack of information provided by Mail about what actually was going on, combined with the inability to actually stop any of the processes (despite clicking the cute stop sign icon).