I almost ended up dumping Apple’s Mail.app this weekend. Sure, I’ve been using it for many years (it must be at least 5 by now) but at some point this weekend it just stopped getting mail from my server. I tried a server reboot, I tried a Mac reboot, I tried deleting cache files. I tried searching Google for solutions. I could see my mail using a webmail client, and using IMAP via Thunderbird, but Mail.app just would not retrieve the messages. Oh, it did finally get all the mail up to a point (exactly where it stopped last time) after I deleted the file that tells Mail.app what it already downloaded, but it still did not get all my new mail.
Typically I leave mail on the server for one week before deletion. This has worked fine for years. I’m still not sure that was the problem, but I connected via Thunderbird (using IMAP) and deleted every old email I knew Mail.app had downloaded, and tried again. That seemed to do it, and the mail started flowing again. Freakin’ weird…
Could one (bad) email have caused the problem? If so, it seems weird that it took so long for me to have this happen. Unless Apple managed to break Mail.app (even more) over the years. Anyway, I post this here for the next person who has this problem. Good luck!
1 reply on “Mail.app almost gone”
i had something similar happen a while back. some email with no header info and a blank subject and message held up the process for a while til i figured it out and deleted it.