MacOS – Mail folder structure: where are most recent messages

macosmail.app

I've got a major cluster-fart on one of my IMAP accounts that's being hammered by bounce messages as backscatter. Over the weekend my Mail on 10.7.4 crashed with a [Crashed Thread: 20 -[MailApp _doBackgroundFetch:]].

Reading up on Google for when Mail unexpectedly crashes 30 sec after loading that I should find the message that's causing it to crash and remove it. The trouble is finding it given I have several mailboxes. And I know where the ~/Library/Mail/ folder is. My problem, after having mail since pre-Jaguar days, my folder structure is like the below:

Bundles >

Mail >

____Mail Lost+Found >

____V2 >

____ ____Several mail account folders >

Mail Lost+Found >

____Several mail account folders >

SpamSieve >

V2 >

____Several mail account folders >

Of course, I'm using SpamSieve, but this crashes before and after its latest update. And the IMAP folders of each account is scattered as indicated. OK, which one? So I get Info on each of the folders listed above looking for a date within the last two days. Nope, the most recent is several months ago.
I've read the V2 is Lion Mail, but as you see above I have more than one.

My question, is after all this time, which folder does what purpose and what files in them should I start yanking to pull the most recent messages out?

Best Answer

If Mail stumbles across a specific messages when accessing the mail server via POP or IMAP it might help to remove the offending message directly on the server. The easiest approach in this case is to access the mailbox via webmail (at least if your provider offers this). Alternatively installing another mail client (e.g. Thunderbird) and using it to delete the offending mail might help as well.

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