How I Fixed My Mail.app
20 September 2004, early evening
So, for those of you who have been reading this site for sometime may recall, my copy of Apple’s email client stopped downloading my mail. I have been making due with Mailsmith, Thunderbird, and other clients all the while hoping one day my “Mail” would just start working again. Today I got sick of waiting. Well, I also only had 5 more days to demo Mailsmith.
After scouring the discussion boards at Apple’s web site, I came to the conclusion that perhaps one of the emails on 1and1’s servers was some how corrupt, and that this was causing Apple’s email client to choke. My solution was to download all the emails I had been saving on the 1and1 server. ( I had been keeping them there in the hope that when Mail started downloading email again, it could grab them all.) I used a clean copy of Mailsmith to do this, and when I grabbed all the mail, I exported it all into an mbox file. My 1and1 server was now empty of all email.
That was all I needed to do. Mail is now happily downloading my email. I imported all the mail that has been collecting all these months, and things are back to normal. I feel good.