Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with mailapp

Please find my email! It's hiding.

pised — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:21:54 -0800

Where did my email go? Mail.app has lost an important email message that is stuck somewhere in between sending on my end and receiving on the receiver's end. How can I get it back? In the past couple of days, my Mail.app on my Macbook has been acting up -- it's not frozen, but it refuses to send and receive messages. I have to force quit (it won't quit on its own) and when that happens, it warns me that any unsaved changes (i.e. the email message I just sent which is now floating out in the interwebs) will be lost. When this happened yesterday, I lost a short email that I had to rewrite and send out again. It had been working fine for most of the day today until I sent out an important email to my thesis supervisor -- I hit send and the message disappeared, but didn't send. It's not in my sent folder (because it clearly wasn't sent) and it's not in my drafts folder (because it's not a draft). Mail.app is hooked up to my university SunJava IMAP email account, which I can get to, and I can send and receive mail in it; it's clearly a Mail.app issue.

When I log in to the web interface for the e-mail account, there is an 8K message in the "Drafts" folder with the correct subject line and recipient, but when I open it there is no text in the message.

Somebody, please, please, please tell me where my email message to my supervisor is hiding and how I can get it back.

Apple Mail.app list selections (and deletes!)

zpousman — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:17:21 -0800

Apple Mail.app question: I'm setting up a friend with Apple's Mail (mail.app 3.5 on Leopard 10.5.5). Everything is great -- it works like a charm. Except for something that is different than his old client (AOL for Mac -- ack!): When a message is selected, and you delete it, the selection moves "UP" the list, selecting the *prior* message, not "DOWN" to the *next* message. This is exactly the opposite of AOL and Outlook and other mail clients. Anybody know of a terminal hack on defaults write or another way to swap this behavior? I have seen the tip to use option+delete, which kinda works, but it gives up the selection entirely, which requires the user to now select again in the list. This is, um, sub-optimal in the extreme since it requires the user to pick back up the mouse.

I have googled to no avail. Anybody care to help me with search terms is welcome (I found the same complaint from Mac os 10.0 from 2000, but...)

trouble synching sent mail on IMAP

bingo — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 15:29:46 -0800

Trouble synching sent mail via IMAP over multiple devices (all of them set up with IMAP). I have two macbooks, each running Mail.app. And I have an iPhone. All three are set up to work with my email account (which is through my job) via IMAP.

I have multiple folders and subfolders set up, and I frequently move items from the Inbox directly into a subfolder. This seems to be fine across the board: if I do it on one device, then that same email will be in that same subfolder on another device. Exactly as it should be with IMAP.

However, Sent mail is a whole different story. There is no telling whether an email I send at work will show up in my Sent folder at home. And what's more (and I have no idea if this is the same problem or not), I have multiple "Sent" folders, both at home and at work.

I don't remember creating multiple Sent folders. I don't know where these other Sent folders came from. Some are called "Sent" and some are called "Sent Messages." Some are at the same folder level as the Inbox, and some are at the level of sub-folders.

I suppose it's possible that the emails I send from work actually are showing up at home, but there are so many Sent folders that I have trouble finding it.

Also of interest: My iPhone actually has a different number of Sent folders (many more) than either of my Mail.app setups (home and work.)

Another possibly relevant factoid: Even though both home and work are using Mail.app on Leopard on Macbooks, the setup is not exactly the same. At home, the work account is one of two I'm using on Mail.app...the other is the account from the last job I had. There's no more mail coming in there, but I want to keep the email, so I still have it. That makes the overall folder structure a little bit different.

Anyway...what am I doing wrong? How can I make it so that I only have one Sent mail folder for this IMAP account, and so that it's exactly the same across home, work, and phone?

Create local finder links for mail.app

Raff — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:35:07 -0800

A few of us work off a local OS X Fileserver. We often need to point each other to files deep with it by email. I am looking for an automated way to create clickable local links in the mail.app friendly format of "file:///Volumes/Server%20Portal/". Any solutions? I have found applescripts that nearly do it. But they only make POSIX links. For Mail to recognise and launch links they need both file:/// appended and spaces replaced with %20. I am guessing it could be achieved by a few additions to current applescripts, but unfortunately it is above me.

Can Gmail 'redirect,' ala Mail.app?

merlinmann — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:56:49 -0800

Can Gmail do something similar to the "Redirect" feature in OS X's Mail.app? I'd like for my assistant to be able to Redirect (rather than Forward) time-sensitive messages that were sent to my public Gmail address.

Redirected email (as it works in Mail.app) resends the exact/original message you received, changing only the "To:" address to whatever you like. The message that new recipient receives is, for my purposes, indistinguishable from the true original.

This would make it so much easier for me to respond to the original message -- right now, when a message is forwarded, I have to fish the sender's address out of the quoted message plus trim out all the extraneous stuff before I can start composing a response. Hitting "cmd-r" in Mail.app would obviously be a lot faster for me.

Can you do Redirecting with a stock Gmail setup? If there's nothing official in Gmail to do this, can you suggest a Firefox extension or GreaseMonkey script that might help accomplish what I'm looking for? My friend is using Gmail with Firefox on Windows Vista.

Help me make Mail.app use Word 2004 instead of Word 2008

leahwrenn — Fri, 09 May 2008 06:03:11 -0800

How do I change the version of Word that Mail.app uses to open Word documents? I hate Word 2008 for the Mac (because it's slow and buggy and doesn't play nice with Expose). Currently, I have both Word 2004 and Word 2008 installed on my computer, and I'd like to keep both of them. However, I would like Word 2004 to be the default version of Word that (suitable) documents open with, both in the Finder and in Mail.app. I can change all in the Finder, but Mail still insists in opening attached files with Word 2008.

Can anyone give me instructions for making Mail.app use Word 2004 instead of Word 2008?

how to restore preview pane in Leopard mail.app?

dcjd — Wed, 07 May 2008 00:50:26 -0800

How do I restore the preview pane on mail.app? I somehow got rid of the preview pane on Leopards mail.app, and after looking through the options and help, I haven't been able to find a way to turn it back on. Please help!

Day of the Deleted Message part 17

nowonmai — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:37:58 -0800

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.

Make mail.app bend to my will.

provocateur — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:52:03 -0800

Mail.app question. Two email addresses. I want to reply from address X, whether the original email came to address X or Y. I want this to be automatic. Migrating dear old dad from AOL. Want to set up mail so that he never replies from AOL again, hoping that over the course of a year or so, very few people still use the AOL address. I know you can select the account to reply from, but I want the machine to do it automatically because dad, frankly, cant be trusted.

How can I get my IMAP Mail back?

4ster — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:51:47 -0800

Using Mail.app in Tiger and now all of my IMAP email is gone. Please help. My ISP (Embarq) gives me POP e-mail, which I forward to Fastmail.fm, so I can have IMAP. I access my IMAP mail in Apple Mail (Tiger).

Last night, something happened where I stopped getting email. Either Embarq stopped forwarding or Fastmail stopped receiving. I decided to just cut out Fastmail, and go back to receiving plain old POP in Mail.app.

When I did this, I lost my IMAP folders and all of the e-mail in them. No problem, I thought. I make regular backups with SuperDuper!, so I'll just go back to my most recent backup and then turn off Airport. I do this, and there are my IMAP folders and in them, the mail I so desperately need.

Yet here's the problem: Mail.app won't let me move the e-mail to a local folder, giving me an error message simply saying the email can't be moved. When I connect to Airport and go online, all my folders and the mail inside of them gets deleted, because the folders and the mail in them isn't on Fastmail's servers anymore.

How can I preserve the e-mail in these folders so that I can simply start over again?

Mail.app cutting off forwarded emails.

mattbucher — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 11:37:24 -0800

In OSX Mail.app (using an IMAP account), why do messages I forward keep getting cutoff or truncated? Has anyone had this problem with forwarding in Mail.app? Do I need to reconfigure the IMAP account?

Please help me with synchronising cleanly

dance — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 03:34:21 -0800

Mail.app + Nokia e61 + gApps IMAP I would love to get my already fairly nifty Mail situation properly synchronised. At the moment, Google Apps handles my email for me and I access it via POP with Mail.app. It is also forwarded to MailForExchange where I am able to sychronise it with my Nokia e61. If I'm out, therefore, I can access and reply to emails. When I get back, though, my sent items in Mail do not reflect mails sent from the phone because gApps had nothing to do with that. In addition, emails read on the e61 are still unread in Mail.app.

What I would love to do is begin using IMAP with gApps but without disturbing the current archive of email I have in Mail.app and begin accessing my email on my phone by that method also.

How can I do this? Do I have to drag my folders into the IMAP folders? This is Mail 3, by the way.

Mail.app won't delete certain messages

Fezboy! — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 07:29:06 -0800

Mail.app does not remove / delete certain messages from my Inbox view. How can this be overcome? On December 14th I deleted several messages from my Inbox using the highlight + delete key method. The messages disappeared temporarily but then returned in a greyed out font (indicating slated for deletion status). Subsequent attempts to delete them were / are unsuccessful. I'm using POP3 and not leaving copies of messages on the server. I've checked using my ISP's webmail client and the messages are not on the server. If I restart Mail.app the messages' status is changed from slated for deletion to read.

Until today it was only these four messages. This morning I attempted to delete several more and they ended up with the slated for deletion status. I couldn't get them to disappear / move to Trash / what-have-you. I restarted the application and today's messages have subsequently been deleted. Still, this has motivated me to seek a permanent solution lest I end up with an Inbox chock-full of persistently undeletable messages.

Stop Gmail from downloading All Mail folder

qwip — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 13:22:43 -0800

I've been using Mail.app with OS X Leopard as a front end to my Gmail account. And it works great, for the most part. Unfortunately it seems to download both my "Inbox" and also the "All Mail" folder from Gmail. This has the effect of increasing the amount of messages in Mail.app significantly, and I want it to stop. Is there a way to unsubscribe to the "All Mail" folder with out effecting the "Inbox"? There is a grayed out subscribe/unsubscribe preference when performing a "Get Info" on the account in Mail.app, so it seems like there is at least a potential to do this. Or am I alone in being the only one bothered by this?

I just don't need to see the "All Mail" folder and it makes searches for emails through Spotlight come up twice. Annoying.

Mail.app takes forever to send email

annabellee — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 12:50:15 -0800

How can I speed up mail sending in Leopard? It's taking eons me to send mail in Apple's Mail.app since installing Leopard. The little wheel in the left-hand menu spins for up to 30 seconds and reads "Sending" before I get the "whoosh" mail sent alert. I have an iBook G4, which I'm aware is an old machine at this point, but Leopard hasn't slowed me down a bit other than the mail-sending situation. How can I make Mail-sending instantaneous?

Mail.app and text attachments

badstone — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 23:10:36 -0800

How can I gets OS X Mail.app to display text attachments as attachments rather than dumping the text inline in the email? I've come to like Mail.app generally, but I have one very annoying problem - I often send/receive XML files. When Mail receives an email with XML attachments, it puts their text inline and not as downloadable attachments. All I can do is copy and paste the text out of the email into new XML files in a text editor, which is very tedious and problematic, not to mention I lose the original file names. There is nothing in preferences nor anything in Apple's support that addresses plain text attachments.

Mismarried Mac, Mac, Mac

prophetsearcher — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:59:34 -0800

How can I sync, and keep in sync, my Powerbook G4 (tiger) & Mac Mini (leopard)? SoSorryForAskingThisPleaseDontEggMeFilter:

I'm surprised that there isn't a streamlined way of accomplishing what I imagine would be a routine setup, but there you have it. How do you achieve this? Help me find the best solution, if not the perfect one.

My Goal:
To be able to use either of my two computers at will, and have them stay up-to-date with one another. I use my laptop to lounge around the house, meet with clients, etc. I use the Mac Mini for intensive work. I use both for common tasks like email and working on documents.

My Setup:
- Powerbook G4 - PPC - Tiger - 80gb
- Mac Mini - Intel - Leopard - 120gb - new.
- Several external harddrives, including an iPod Classic 160gb
- One of the hard drives is a Lacie Ethernet 500gb, but I doubt my poor Internet setup (see below) can do anything useful with it. and I'm not sure I know how to use it really
- Slow internet connection with a Belkin N1 wireless router (can't change)
- I use SuperDuper to back up my Powerbook

What I've Tried:
- An initial Migration Assistant -- I get an inexplicable error message each time I attempt it. It hasn't worked. I set up my Powerbook as the target disk, the Mac Mini recognized it, but the actual sync failed.

- dotMac subscription -- I tried the demo, even though I really don't want to pay for it in the future, and the notdotmac thing just scares me. Still, it doesn't seem that it will be the panacea I'm looking for, in that it IMAPs and has a 10gb limit, which I don't imagine to be enough (I have about 8 email accounts and a LOT of attachments). And, it's pricey.

- gmail-imap-mail.app -- I've been using POP3 on my powerbook with my gmail accounts, and think it's the bee's knees. I really didn't want to go down the IMAP route, since I want the messages to be all stored locally, and instantly readable. Still, I gave it a chance with a throwaway gmail account. I saw why it could work, but it's so... very... slow... It can sometimes take *minutes* to open a simple message. I realize this is likely the fault of my ISP or whatever, but there's not much I can do about it. I might decide to bear with it if y'all convince me it's the way to go -- and if it can sync the sent messages and statuses of my email/gmail on both my machines.

My Questions: it's really all one big question, but I'll break it down for simplicity's sake
1. Should/could I use my already-used Leopard disk to upgrade my Powerbook, so I can more simply use File Sharing and integrate the systems, and use Chronosync easily?
2. ChronoSync. Has anyone used it in this sort of situation? I don't trust myself to run a sync every time I switch computers, which is what the program seems to want, to avoid 'erratic results.' I see that a new version is out soon. Maybe it will be more foolproof?
3. If I do switch to IMAP, does that mean that all of my POPped emails will be overwritten, unfiled, unmarked as read? Should I sync the messages first to the other computer and then switch?
4. dotMac. Should I give it another chance? If I use POP on each of my computers to the same account (assuming this works) - will dotMac keep them synced -- as in, what's been read, what's been deleted, what's been sent?
5. How else can I creatively achieve harmony?

I've seen the other threads on the topic, but none are as fully integrated as I hope. I apologize if this post seems fussy, finicky and finical. I'm just looking for your solutions to a similar setup.

Probs with OS X Mail App

dobbs — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 08:59:41 -0800

This is driving my family bonkers: Mom is on OS X (Tiger) using Mail APP. Mom sends X an email. X replies to email. X's reply comes back to X. (ie, My mom's emails substitute the email address of the person she's emailing in the reply-to field.) This doesn't matter who she is mailing or which account she's mailing from (her ISP account or her own domain). It also doesn't matter which ISP she uses (she's switched, thinking the prob was with one of them).

I've searched through Mail App for a possible switch or field regarding the reply to variable. Found nothing. This has been going on for six months and I'm ready to throw the computer out the window.

Merging mailboxes across different OS X boxes?

Mutant — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 04:43:49 -0800

Merging mailboxes maintained with the Mail app under OS X? I use the OS X Mail app to send & receive email on five different accounts.

I had an accident and my 15" 1.25Ghz PowerBook got trashed. The case was bent sharply and although the machine ran just fine it would not sleep. The PowerBook and I visited the Genius Bar at the Apple Store on Regent Street where it was repaired in about two weeks.

But I need a machine so before I sent the 15" off I purchased a sweet 12" 1.5Ghz PowerBook, and used Apples Migration Assistant to "clone" the original machine onto the new one. I figured the 12" would visit Mr eBay once the 15" was home.

So two weeks later I got the 15" back, but one thing led to another and although I've tried to be disciplined some six weeks later the mail spools on the two machines are inconsistent. In terms of receiving, the 15" does have the canonical inbox across all the accounts, but both machines have slightly different outboxes (i.e., I've sent from both computers). These tied to POP3 mailboxes on the various servers.

What options do I have to merge the mailboxes across the two computers? I'd hate to have to do this manually as I'm sure I'd miss something. And the 12"? Yeh I know, I'm a loser - I'm keeping both.