MacOS – Mail.app inbox becomes blank after a few minutes of use

macosmail.app

On a newly installed and fully updated Mountain Lion system, I see the following problem:

After a few minutes of using Mail.app (or even just letting it sit in the dock), the inbox becomes empty. More precisely, the inbox of an Exchange mail account becomes empty. If I let the program sit in the dock, I receive new mail notifications, but I can't read the messages because the inbox looks empty.

Restarting Mail.app is a temporary fix, but the problem will come back in a few minutes.

Has anyone seen this problem? Are there any solutions? I did not do anything special which could have caused this and my inbox is small (less than 100 MB—I did read that this can happen when the inbox is too large)

Best Answer

Is your exchange environment hosted? Office 365 perhaps?

My mailbox occasionally does exactly what you describe. This was a known issue in ML, I would expect a fix at some point, but for now here are the few steps that I take that fixes it for awhile.None of this seems to be a "permanent" fix, but should last a bit longer.

  1. Select the folder in Mail that is missing items.
  2. Select "Mailbox"
  3. Select "Rebuild" from the bottom of the menu.

OR...

You can rebuild the Envelope-Index by throwing it away, it's located at ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/

  1. Your Library folder is hidden by default. Select Finder (in the dock) > “Go to Folder” and then enter “~/Library.”

  2. In ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData, delete any file that begins with “Envelope Index,” such as Envelope Index or Envelope Index-shm.

  3. Mail will rebuild the Envelope index when it is reopened. It will take a few minutes to rebuild the entire index.

If you're using Office 365, I've had more success by disabling the "Use Auto-Discover service" on those mail clients that are misbehaving.

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