[Since EBCDIC]

Mail.app (v. 3.3, Mac OS X 10.5.3) now shows many blank message bodies (but the sender and subject lines are as expected). View > Message > Long Source shows nothing. The alternate views are greyed out. I never noticed this before the 10.5.3 update, but I'm not claiming any causality.

Does anyone know how to remedy this? I've done a rebuild on this mailbox but it didn't help. I haven't gone into the raw mailbox files to see whether the data are actually there.. [UPDATE] I went in and checked. It gets wierder: for a particular message (with a subject it was easy to grep for) I see a thread with three or four exact copies of the message, but only the bottom one actually has a body. If I "delete" one or two of these messages they don't disappear but have their inbox text greyed out. Actually the mailbox line blinks out, the table is collapsed, then the line appears with the text greyed. WTF?

Investigating this further I see that almost every (maybe all) messages are "threaded" with multiple instances. Many have four instances, some have two. I haven't spend enough time to see whether this range varies over time, or seems random.

This is seriously putting a cramp into my email usage :-) Anyone have a clue?

[Since EBCDIC]

Found my own answer, mostly. This web page, Rescuing Mail.app Orphaned Emails, explains the problem, or a related problem, in depth.

What I wound up doing was quitting Mail.app, backing up my Mail folder, deleting Envelope Index, moving all the .emlx files from the Messages-(blah) folders to its sibling, and restarting Mail.app.

It seems that all is fixed, except one has to rebuild every mailbox. Isn't there a way to re-build them all, en masse?