Delete stuck outbound messages from Mail

Feb 01, '08 07:30:01AM

Contributed by: doug148

I recently bought my parents a Mac mini, their first Mac. They like it, but unfortunately, only have access to the Internet over dial-up. They will often find that a message gets stuck in the outbox, and rather than wait for it to (eventually) send, they would rather just remove it. You can click on the message and hit the Delete button, but the message count for the outbox doesn't change. If you quit and restart Mail, the messages are still there. What does work is to remove the messages via the shell:

rm -f ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Outbox.mbox/Messages/*.emlx
I wrote a simple AppleScript program that they can use to accomplish this, after first quitting Mail. It isn't perfect -- when Mail starts again, the Outbox count initially shows a count, but Mail must figure out that the messages no longer exist, because it soon resets the message count in the Outbox. Not perfect, but effective.

[robg adds: Note that the above command deletes all messages in the outbox.]

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