10.3: A fix for sent Mail messages not getting saved

Nov 24, '03 09:59:00AM

Contributed by: jonny5

I've never seen mention of anyone else having this problem, but who knows... maybe there is someone out there.

After my clean-install of Panther and restoring my mailboxes from backup, I noticed that the sent mail from one of my email accounts was not getting saved. It's an IMAP account, and I tried all permutations of preference settings, deleting the .plist file, and deleting/re-adding the account -- all to no avail.

After some poking around in various log files, I noticed an error message indicating that the mailbox "Sent Mail (school email)" could not be created because it already existed. I then realized that my (possibly not-so-kosher) method of restoring my mail folders (coping all my old Jaguar .mbox files into ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/) had led to some problems. Instead of creating a folder for "school email" nested within the "Sent" folder, it created an entirely different "Sent Mail (school email)" folder which contained all my old sent messages for that account.

When I removed that mailbox folder, everything was restored to normal and sent messages are saved properly for all accounts. A "school email" folder was created nested under the "Sent" folder.

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