Missing sent email messages in Apple Mail.

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Level 1

32 points

Missing sent email messages in Apple Mail.

This morning I looked at Apple Mail on my Mac mini running Monterey 12.6 and found only half a dozen emails remaining in the sent folder since the middle of March. There are two from today, two in July and then all as normal from the middle of March going back. I have ten email accounts and sending email regularly, so this sudden loss of emails is baffling and obviously of concern.

Very strangely, if I search for specific sent messages I can find them, however they do not appear in the normal sent folders view. This suggests the issue is with the database in Mail and not related to the server. In any case this is affecting gmail, iCloud and a couple different web servers.

So far I have tried rebuilding all the sent email boxes inside Mail, then gone to the user library Mail folder to delete Envelope Index, Envelope Index-sim and Envelop Index-wal inside V9 > Mail Data. The next time Mail was started it went through a set up stage, which should have completely refreshed the database, however the issue remains.

Does anybody know how to fix this? All the accounts are IMAP and I must be missing hundreds of sent emails in the normal sent folders.

Thanks

Ashley

Mac mini, macOS 12.6

Posted on Oct 17, 2022 06:12 AM

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Answer 1

MVegas21

Community Specialist

Oct 19, 2022 10:35 AM in response to ashley karyl

ashley karyl,

Understood. If you'd like to reach out to Apple Support directly so they can look into this with you further. They can be contacted here: Get Support, or by calling the most applicable phone number from this list: Contact Apple for support and service.

Best regards.

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Answer 2

Bill_T1

Community Specialist

Oct 18, 2022 04:45 PM in response to ashley karyl

Hi ashley karyl,

You indicate that you're able to search for the messages in question. In the search results, the folder containing the message should be displayed for each result. Are those showing they are located in the Sent folder, Trash or somewhere else? Check the rules settings to ensure that you don't have rules configured that may be relocating these messages.

If those suggestions don't help, use Apple Support to connect with AppleCare for further investigation.

Regards.

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Answer 3

ashley karyl Author

Level 1

32 points

Oct 19, 2022 10:27 AM in response to Bill_T1

Thank you for your reply. The searched messages do indeed show as being visible in the sent folder, however they are only visible when searched. I've tried disabling all rules and it makes no difference.

After doing some further research, I have discovered that disabling my main email account then reveals sent email for all the other accounts normally over that period. When enabled again they disappear, so my suspicion is that there is some kind of file corruption here that is causing serious mischief.

I was able to set up these addresses on Spark and there are no problems, so once again it points to issues with Mail, however I am rather lost on further options to fix this. Right now I thinking my best choice would be to wait for a week or so until Ventura is released then attempt a clean install.

I tried reinstalling Monterey via recovery mode, however that didn't help, so it looks like this may need a clean start before downloading everything from the mail server. It seems you need to be a developer to have the option of a clean install with the Ventura beta, so I'll have to wait.

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Missing sent email messages in Apple Mail.

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