[X Newbies] Mailbox won't rebuild

[Norman Cohen]

I've had some problems like this in the past. What I ended up doing was 
going into my user Library directory, then into the mail directory and 
found the offending mail box. If you control click on that mailbox and 
choose "Show Contents" you'll see a Mailbox file as well as an index 
file. If you delete the index file, then reopen Mail, the index will be 
rebuilt. It's worked for me when I've had failure to rebuild the 
directory. Also, you may want to copy the mailbox to the Desktop or 
somewhere safe before choosing "Show Contents" so that you have a 
backup before doing this.

Norm
On Nov 16, 2003, at 4:33 PM, J Patrick Draine wrote:

> I use Mail on my iMac ( X 10.2.8, 500 MHz), and have accumulated a 
> huge quantity of e-mail (like 7K messages) which I read but thought I 
> *might* need some day. Now Mail seems to spend far too much of its 
> time cataloging  and sorting all that mail (during which the little 
> gear-like icon on the right grinds away).
> Rebuilding the Mailbox *should* help, but Mail bails out in the 
> attempt, indicating something is too corrupted to finish the job (I 
> forget the exact wording).
> Any thoughts? Should I just print out the really invaluable messages 
> and toss the rest & start over again? Putting the unwanted e-mail 
> piece by piece is just too labor intensive (as every batch that I 
> delete leads to more cataloging etc).
> Patrick Draine
>
Norman Cohen
nacohen at mac.com