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mixin visuals · Mar 1, 2004, 03:51 PM

ok, mail is bugging out on me in jaguar

i am receiving new emails, but they are showing up with nothing able to be seen within them

i think i need to rebuild the mailbox maybe, but after using apple help viewer and searching here, i have found nothing that tells exactly what rebuilding the mailbox actually does.

i do not want to lose any emails i have already.

will rebuilding the mailbox do this?

echosphere · Mar 1, 2004, 03:56 PM

I am not an expert. But in Jaguar and Panther, I have done this multiple times for the past year or so about twice a month. Though, to be honest, I really don't know if it would help with your problem. It's seems to "clean up" files and speed opening and listing emails, but this could also be a placebo effect.

In the end though, it should never delete emails. Another thing you could try to do is Synchronize your .Mac account (should be in the same drop down menu). Some other posters have been experiencing some "lag" with the .Mac servers (as have I today) so it just may be VERY slow in loading. Especially if there are big image, this is always normal for it to load slowly. Sometimes, when it looks like nothing is happening give it even a 2 or 3 minutes and wait.

mixin visuals · Mar 1, 2004, 04:07 PM

i don't have a .Mac account, but thanks for the reply.

as long as my emails don't disappear

mishap · Mar 2, 2004, 09:47 AM

Is there a way to get rid of all your past attachments that may be hiding out in my ~/Library/Mail folder?

i rather not delete the original emails.

bergy · Mar 2, 2004, 12:49 PM

Apple suggests disk utility to repair disk and permissions and if that doesn't help that it may be indicative of larger problem.

I was curious about rebuilding mail after this post, and went to do it myself, but its grayed out. How do you make it active?

echosphere · Mar 2, 2004, 03:38 PM

BERGY:

You need to be in the inbox, outbox or some other similar "box" to Rebuild (i.e. not grayed out). I guess this means that you must rebuild each "box" at a time. I just go through the list of boxes and rebuild each one at a time. Let me know if this works.

bergy · 05:07 PM

Originally posted by echosphere:
BERGY:

You need to be in the inbox, outbox or some other similar "box" to Rebuild (i.e. not grayed out). I guess this means that you must rebuild each "box" at a time. I just go through the list of boxes and rebuild each one at a time. Let me know if this works.

Thanks for the reply.. I am still greyed out even though I am in a mailbox. The only thing I have done is move my mail over from Jaguar when I updated. I wonder if that's the reason.

Confirmed .. I just checked a new user account and I can rebuild there. All the accounts that I moved Mail over from Jaguar I can't rebuild.

Preciousss · Mar 2, 2004, 04:42 PM

This is how I understand it. If I'm wrong, please correct me.

With all of the email that gets saved and deleted, including attachments, in your email client, your mail database tends to grow and shrink accordingly (not sure if fragmentation applies here).

With Entourage at least, let's say that at one point you had a 80MB mail database but have since deleted a lot of emails with large pictures that were sent to you. Even though the database has shrunk to 73MB with those messages deleted, it stays at 80MB. It won't shrink without you rebuilding the database, but it will grow bigger if you get even more large pix sent to you. I don't recall the exact number, but I think there was a suggested limit for how big you should let your Entourage mail database get before it starts getting buggy (4GB or something?).

Rebuilding the database in Entourage creates a new slimmed down copy (better maximization of space, faster indexing, etc.). It doesn't trash your old database but keeps it around for you to make sure nothing important was lost. Also, there are two different "settings" for rebuilding, one of them is meant for data recovery (I think) and is preceded by the usual "only do this if you're sure" messages. I'm not sure how Mail handles it.

Sorry for all the Entourage references--that's how I learned all of this stuff. I may have gotten some of the details off, but I think the general idea is correct. Rebuilding your library is also an option in iPhoto, and is one of the recommendations for speeding things up. Apple doesn't do a very good job of documenting it, however. I looked in Help and the Knowledge Base and found nothing instructing me how to rebuild the iPhoto library. Had to search back through some notes I took from this forum.

Originally posted by mixin visuals:
ok, mail is bugging out on me in jaguar

i am receiving new emails, but they are showing up with nothing able to be seen within them

i think i need to rebuild the mailbox maybe, but after using apple help viewer and searching here, i have found nothing that tells exactly what rebuilding the mailbox actually does.

i do not want to lose any emails i have already.

will rebuilding the mailbox do this?

Big Mac · Mar 3, 2004, 06:02 AM

The previous poster who wrote about the rebuild creating a smaller version is most likely right. All email clients save the stuff that has been deleted, and it's up to the user to slim the files down. Most clients call that compacting the mailbox. I doubt that this procedure would remedy the empty message problem you're experiencing, though. Are any messages being received fine? The messages you're worried about may not be valid ones at all - they may be spam and/or PC virus messages. Those are pretty common. It's not common for an email client to destructively erases message content - I've never heard of that.