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A workaround for a read-only Mail inbox Apps
I recently received a new Mac on my desk, and moved my data from old to new via Carbon Copy Cloner, including the entire Users folder. Upon setting up Mail to check my IMAP email account, I found that the Inbox was "read-only," and that I could not change ownership or permissions on my Mail folders in my Library folder.

Well, my new user name and old user name were slightly different, for clarity's sake, and of course the old Mail folders were "owned" by the old user ... but even though I am an admin user, I could not get the permissions to change. They would show the proper user names in the Get Info text fields, but there were still red minus-sign badges on the folder icons that showed the folders were still read-only. Permission changes were not taking effect. Comparing this Mail folder with that of a test user account I created showed that these permissions were definitely wrong.

Finally, I moved the entire Mail folder out of my Library and started Mail again -- now I can finally delete mail from my Inbox.
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A workaround for a read-only Mail inbox
Authored by: restiffbard on Jan 21, '04 02:14:00PM

Did you ever try dropping into the terminal and changing permissions there?

something like "sudo chown username mailBox"



[ Reply to This | # ]
A workaround for a read-only Mail inbox
Authored by: bcraig on Jan 22, '04 10:30:59AM

What you need to do is find out what your new UID (User ID) is. Not your username but the number your Mac assigned to your username. There are a bunch of ways to do that but a simple way is to create a file then list the file to find out who owns it.

In the terminal touch a file


touch foo


Now list it using the "-n" flag



ls -aln foo


You should see somthing like this:


-rw-r--r-- 1 501 0 0 Jan 22 07:23 foo


In this case the UID of the created file is "501" and the group ID (GID) is "0" Now all you need to do is change the ownership of the old mail directory.

Make sure to use the "-R" to rucursively change ownership and use the UID and GID from above:


sudo chown -R 501:0 foo


This will change both the owner and group of the dirctory to you. Good Luck!



[ Reply to This | # ]
Updated for 10.5
Authored by: vxbush on Sep 04, '10 07:30:37AM

I ran into a problem where my inbox was set as read-only, but it wasn't a problem with the changed user name. Somehow the extended attributes got set as follows:

0 drwx------+ 4 user group 136 Dec 24 13:54:21 2008 INBOX.mbox 0: group:everyone deny add_file,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,writeattr,writeextattr,chown

Run the following command to get rid of the attributes:

% chmod -a# 0 INBOX.mbox/

And then make sure you have complete access by doing:

chmod u+rwx INBOX.mbox/

Maybe this will help someone else with the same problem as me and is doing a Google search.

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Hey, don't look at me. I'm not responsible.


[ Reply to This | # ]