The MacPerils of Carmel – Episode 1

Recently I’ve been having a problem with my Mail app, not a big problem, but it’s VERY annoying.

I put out a help call to the MyMac staff as follows:

Several weeks ago I became aware that the amount of spam getting through my ISP’s filters and Mail’s junk filter had been increasing markedly. Thus I decided to put Mail into training mode. I didn’t change any settings. Result – Mail started labelling almost everything as possible junk. When I told it a particular item was not junk it removed the label icon but not the junk mail colour I’d set. As an experiment, I tried telling Mail the item WAS junk, then clicking ‘not junk’. This worked momentarily. If I moved to another folder then back again, all the junk colour returned and often the junk label as well. Even MORE mystifyingly, ALL emails I send appear in the sent folder with junk colour and labels attached. A little experimenting revealed that when I moved messages to ANY folder they took on junk status.

I updated to 10.4.6 to see if that would help. It didn’t.

Below are the replies (edited in the interests of brevity and according to the seriousness of the situation. My comments added where appropriate)

1. John Martellaro

In your home directory, in /Library/Preferences, there is a file named:

com.apple.mail.plist

Delete it and rebuild your Mail.app preferences. See what happens.

XML property list files getting corrupted is a common source of problems in Mac OS X.

(C: I did this once, but there was no change in Mail’s behaviour. Later I tried it again … and lost all my mail folders! Fortunately I had not permanently delated the file and just put it back in the directory. Whew!)

—

2. David Casseres

Mail maintains a database containing what it has “learned” about junk mail.  Over time, this sometimes becomes corrupted; it’s a long-standing bug.

It happened to me just recently.  Suddenly I was seeing all sorts of spam that should have been filtered out.  What I did to fix Mail was this (I’ve doine it a few times now):

• Make a new mail folder, and call it something like Temporary Junk.

• Let a hundred or so junk messages accumulate in the Junk folder.

• Select all of the junk messages and mark all of them “Not Junk.”

• Move them to the Temporary Junk folder.

• Open Mail’s Preferences, go to the Junk Mail tab, and click the Reset button.  This has the effect of throwing away the corrupted database.

• Again select all the junk messages, and mark them as “Junk.”  They will disappear into the Junk folder, and now you can delete the Temporary Junk folder.

—

(C: David’s suggestion caused me to remember having a similar problem some time ago, which was fixed by this procedure. My current problem is somewhat more complex, but I did as instructed.

Alas, still no success.)
—

Roger (a message which was mysteriously delayed:

i wonder how you updated to a later version? you seem to have
all your mail, and that indicates that you didn’t update your
mail app, but only part of the os.

(C: But updates of OS X don’t seem to affect the user directory)

what we would need to know first of all, is your mail account
POP or IMAP?

(C: POP)

and- what mac are you running this on? what is its
configuation, especially memory-wise.

(C: G4/1Ghz tower, 768 SDRAM, 180Gb storage … about half unused.)

dol you have any other mail apps on board? (mulberry, eudora, gyaz)

(C: No.)

are you using any other browsers? (mozilla, thunderbird, opera)

(C: No … except [cough, splutter] Explorer when forced to)

these things are so complex, and, down inside the unseen code,
your mail can be influenced by similar bits and snips of code.
—

At time of writing, Mail continues to label almost everything ‘junk’ (including test messages I send myself) and EVERYTHING that goes into my sent folder.

I’ve now updated to 10.4.7, which hasn’t helped either.

The mystery is why it lets SOME messages through … e.g. (amusingly) emails from John Farr. There are only a handful which get through unscathed and I have been unable to detect any pattern, metaphysical or otherwise. I’ve almost reached the conclusion that I’ll have to reinstall the system software (or just the Mail app?).

I’m open to all suggestions, even witches’ spells.