Where are my e-mails?

October 26, 2006 4:30 PM

Apple Mail has suddenly stopped retrieving my messages...

I have Apple Mail set up to receive messages from several gmail accounts and a hotmail account. This has always worked with no problems, but for some reason on Tuesday it stopped receiving messages from all but one account. I am able to read my messages by using Gmail in my web browser, but this is very frustrating since I use Apple Mail to categorize and store e-mails. I tried Connection Doctor, and tried changing/updating my passwords... no success. Has anyone experienced this? I especially can't understand why ONE account still works.
Thanks!

posted by purplefiber to computers & internet (7 comments total)

How big is your Mail-folder? it could be bulging and Mail will start to get annoying if it gets too full. And in this respect 10.3 is worse than 10.4.
posted by KimG at 4:59 PM on October 26, 2006

When you run the Console application (in Applications:Utilities), what does it say when you're retrieving messages? That information ought to say quite a lot about what's happening.
posted by majick at 5:23 PM on October 26, 2006

What do you see if you open the Activity window ("Activity Viewer" under the Window menu)?
posted by Armitage Shanks at 6:40 PM on October 26, 2006

KimG- It's big but I tried deleting a huge number of e-mails and it didn't make a difference.

majick: a lot of numbers, "purplefiber's computer is configured", and "user interaction is not allowed"

Armitage Shanks: I saw the Activity viewer checking for messages a few seconds ago- it went through all my accounts and appeared to have no difficulty, but didn't receive any messages.
posted by purplefiber at 6:52 PM on October 26, 2006

Something like this was just happening to me. After jiggling everythng I could think of on my mac I went to gmail and reset the pop settings to what they already were. Seems to be working.
posted by pointilist at 8:34 PM on October 26, 2006

The activity view in Mail.app lies to you, BTW — it has only a very rough correlation to what Mail is doing. It'll often claim to be checking one mailbox while Mail is actually looking at a different one, etc.

Purplefiber — did you expunge the deleted messages (cmd-K)? If not, your mailbox is still large. (You might have it set to do that automatically.)
posted by hattifattener at 9:23 PM on October 26, 2006

I had this exact problem for a very long time. I think certain messages make Mail choke. Here is how I solved the problem.
posted by chunking express at 12:24 PM on October 27, 2006