Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Mailbox renaming deletes messages

by alanwoollcombe Aug 23, 2009 11:56PM PDT

Hi.

My apologies if this problem has already been covered - I haven't seen it.

Yesterday I tried to rename a mailbox (folder) in Mail. As soon as I changed the name, all of its sub-folders (sub-mailboxes?) disappeared except the one I was in. That particular sub-folder still shows its message (email) headers, but each email has lost its contents and is now showing the following error message:

"The message from ... has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it."

All the missing sub-folders are sitting in an extra white (greyed-out?) phantom mailbox with the old name, and they are showing no emails at all.

In short, I appear to have lost all the messages (emails) in the renamed mailbox and its sub-folders, and the Undo button in the Edit menu is greyed out.

Can anyone suggest a way to bring them back? Restoring the system to the most recent back-up will mean I will lose a lot of messages.

My version of Mail is 2.1.3 and I am running OS 10.4.11.

Thanks!

Discussion is locked

2 Posts

- Collapse + Expand Details

- Collapse -

You could try putting the names back as they were

by mrmacfixit Forum moderator Aug 24, 2009 10:34AM PDT

Mailboxes are created when you make a new account in Mail.
Changing the name of the mailbox after you have created it, causes problems and there is no longer an account that is matched with the new name.

Rename again and see what happens

Failing that, do you have a backup you can use?

P

- Collapse -

Problem solved, but why...?

by alanwoollcombe Aug 24, 2009 5:16PM PDT

Thanks for that. Happily I have now managed to solve the problem.

I tried rebuilding each empty sub-folder and all their missing emails reappeared intact. I then moved each sub-folder across from the ghost mailbox to the new (renamed) one, and that worked too. The one remaining sub-folder that hadn't vanished I moved over to the ghost mailbox, then rebuilt it too and moved it back. I was then able to delete the now empty ghost mailbox and back up the whole lot before doing anything else. Problem solved.

However, what I don't get is why the problem occurred in the first place. You're clearly right that changing the name of a mailbox causes problems, so why is it an option in the Mailbox menu? What am I missing here?

Thanks again anyway.

Alan

Back to Mac Applications forum