A client called yesterday for help … ”mail has stopped collecting my emails” was the issue. As you would expect in a business environment email is viewed locally using an imap connection to the server. Briefly, the IMAP connection allows access and updating from multiple email clients (including webmail) and ensures that all of your email history is retained on your mail server for safety.
Diagnostics showed:
- the connection with the server was ok
- other email clients could access the mailbox using imap
- there was nothing untoward in the server logs
- stopping and restarting mail.app had no effect
- stopping and restarting the iMac had no effect
The immediate workaround was to use another email client to monitor (and action) urgent emails. In this case the client was able to use his iPhone while we investigated further.
The steps to a solution were:
Previous similar cases had been resolved by vacuuming the Envelopes database. Whilst this is relatively easy to do by hand on an ad-hoc basis, it involves remembering the steps, command lines etc.
Research pointed to VacuumMail which can be used on an ad-hoc basis as well as automatically. Most of the links to VacuumMail in Google are wrong, so use this one instead.
- download and install VacuumMail
- run VacuumMail from the Applications/Utilities folder
- check to see if your problem has been resolved.
This fix works sometimes, and is particularly useful when the issue is sluggishness rather than hanging. In this case, didn’t work so we moved on to the next step.
- Find and run Disk Utility under Utilities in Applications
- Select your hard disk on the left and click “Repair Disk Permissions”
Still no joy … reverting to the sledgehammer approach:
- Remove the hanging account under Mail => Preferences => Accounts
- Shut down mail.app
- Start mail.app and set up the deleted IMAP account again
Problem solved (after some time mail reloaded and reindexed all of the mail in the account.
Remember that this works because the account was an IMAP account which means that the actual mail storage is on the server, mail.app effectively syncs a local copy of the account. That’s why we always use IMAP!
