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One possible solution for 'vanished' Mail messages Apps
I ran into a problem with gMail and another POP provider the other day whereby POP mail would download, but fail to show up in Apple Mail. Checked permissions and all was good. In fact, I even went as far as chmoding my home directory recursively to 777 in a bid to troubleshoot the problem. It was to no avail. I then tried recreating the offending account, still to no avail.

After mucking around, Mail gave an error message saying the directory could not be written to (despite all the checks and changes made earlier). There were no readily apparent barriers to creating/modifying files/folders in the Finder (via Get Info) or in the Terminal (via ls -al). It was almost like some other permissions system was in control of the folder.

However, SubEthaEdit was able to show me the directories that were apparently not writable. I recreated all the offending directories by hand, copied in the subdirectories from the original folder, and all was fine again. Strange error.

So in summary:

Symptoms:
  1. Mail retrieves the file off the POP server, but it does not appear in the inbox.
  2. Recreating the POP account in Mail does not help.
  3. The permissions seem fine by all accounts.
  4. You start to get very frustrated...
Possible Solution:
  1. Use SubEthaEdit (or other such program that can show locked directories) to look for 'unwritable' directories (save a dummy file, and use the File: Save panel to browse your directory tree).
  2. Recreate any unwritable directories.
  3. Manually copy all the subdirectory contents from the original directory.
  4. Replace the unwritable directory with the newly-created one.
[robg adds: I would have recommended a Repair Permissions step in there somewhere. I'm publishing this mainly as an example of one way of troubleshooting and repairing an odd Mail problem -- I do not recommend it as a general step in the troubleshooting process, but if you get desperate, it may help save the day...]
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One possible solution for 'vanished' Mail messages | 7 comments | Create New Account
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questionable solutions
Authored by: sjk on May 26, '06 07:04:46PM
It would be useful to know which directories were unwritable; that info might be helpful to determine and understand how they got that way. And if they were under the home directory then Repair Disk Permissions wouldn't have noticed them.

Using chmod -R 777 ... or other methods to recursively set global write permissions of files and/or directories under entire home (or system) hierarchies is never recommended unless you really want them completely vulnerable to unintentional deletion/modification. You'd better have a darn good reason to justify driving 100km/hour in a school zone. ;-)

[ Reply to This | # ]
questionable solutions
Authored by: LC on May 26, '06 09:46:21PM
chmod -fR u+w ~
find ~ -type d -exec chmod +x {} \;


No likey "777" (no likey "kill -9" etc.)

[ Reply to This | # ]
questionable solutions
Authored by: LC on May 26, '06 09:51:21PM
I meant,
chmod -fR u+rw ~

[ Reply to This | # ]
One possible solution for 'vanished' Mail messages
Authored by: dalbuchs on May 29, '06 12:23:30PM

I was interested in your hint as I have the same problem with gmail. However,
even after downloading SubEthaEdit, I couldn't follow your steps. In particular, I
couldn't see how to get the unwritable files from SubEthaEdit.



[ Reply to This | # ]
me neither
Authored by: schaps on May 29, '06 07:36:19PM

SubEthaEdit has a bunch of cool features, but there are no preference settings to show locked directories that I could find.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Not good
Authored by: kholburn on May 29, '06 04:28:11PM
The simplest way to check if a directory is writable is to try writing in it:

touch /path/to/directory
then check the file is there:

ls -l /file.name
Then to fix:

chmod ux+w /path/to/directory
Setting a directory to 777 is a bad idea. All that said running Disk Utility "fix Permissions" before all this would be a good idea.

[ Reply to This | # ]
One possible solution for 'vanished' Mail messages
Authored by: 97mop on May 30, '06 02:43:14AM

One reason that you might be unable to write to a directory even after setting it to "chmod 777" is that the old read-only flag from OS 9 isstill respected in OS X. It is not reset by chmod - it's a different flag alltogether. To fix, Get Info for the file in Finder and remove the flag.

For those interested in the FreeBSD features Apple implemented into the UNIX underpinnings to support the old Finder flag, install the developer tools and play around with the terminal command SetFile (it's in /Developer/Tools, I think), or just Google for "user immutable".



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