Day of the Deleted Message part 17

May 6, 2008 11:37 AM

I have a long-winded question about deleting zombie messages from Apple's mail.app.

I am trying to get rid of some unwanted email on my Mac, and finding it surprisingly difficult.

Mac OSX 10.4, downloading email from a Microsoft exchange server by POP3 because that's what the IT guys said to do.

Once a week or so I get an email that's really intended for somebody else with the same name as me in the same organization. The emails have 300-odd addresses in the the "To:" line, including a dozen or so distribution lists, to one of which I must have been mistakenly added. I have no idea how to get myself off these lists, so that is unfortunately not the answer.

Anyway, Mail.app just stalls and has to be force-quit when trying to download these messages. I then log into webmail, delete the offending message, and everything's OK again.

Except there are a whole bunch of these messages on my computer now, and try as I might I can not delete them. They just respawn. If I move them to a folder, they respawn in my inbox and now I have more copies. I have tried the rebuild mailbox command. I have tried deleting .emlx files that contain these messages - this deletes the contents of the messages, but the headers seem to stay in the system somewhere, and now my inbox is full of disembodied headers.

Does anybody have any ideas what else I can do? Are there other files I can delete without borking up all the rest of my mail? (My saved mail from my boss and colleagues is important, and there's many megabytes of it). Can I edit some file somewhere by hand to remove database lines containing a certain string? Can I export and reimport my messages in a way that will allow me to strip out the dodgy ones? Is there some Voodoo trick that might help? I have googled extensively, but the universal answer seems to be "rebuild mailbox", which just doesn't help.

posted by nowonmai to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Control-x to cut each message from your inbox. You may be able to do this with a bunch at a time, but sometimes you will have to cut each one individually.

This only works if the messages have in fact been deleted from your mail server inbox. Otherwise Mail will keep re-downloading them as you check mail again.
posted by Aquaman at 11:42 AM on May 6

WTF? How in hell does that work when the delete command doesn't? Is it just me or is that bizarre? What does the program do differently? How did you know?
Thankyou so much! (For completeness and future reference, it's CMD-x not Ctrl, but that makes you no less awesome.)
posted by nowonmai at 11:57 AM on May 6

Sorry about the cmd-ctrl thing: I'm using a wireless pc keyboard with my mac! Talk about confusing!

I had the same problem two weeks ago. Random googling led me to that solution. No idea why delete doesn't work the same way. I love macs, always have since 1984, but jeez laweez...
posted by Aquaman at 1:19 PM on May 6

Under the Mail menu go to Preferences, then

Accounts: : Advanced: Remove copy from server (check box)
posted by dinger at 5:49 PM on May 6