[X4U] Sent Mailbox empty

[A. Scott McCulloch]

Based on the reading I've done on the apple discussion forums, it  
looks like our issue was probably directly related to the size of the  
sent mail mbox... apparently, as the size of an mbox approaches 1GB  
in Panther, or 2GB in Tiger, the greater the likelihood of  
corruption. So, in order to avoid future problems, I guess I'll have  
to set up a protocol for message archiving.

In the meantime, it looks like her 800+MB of sent mail messages are  
gone.

Scott



On Nov 28, 2005, at 2:27 PM, Stroller wrote:

>
> On Nov 28, 2005, at 4:18 pm, A. Scott McCulloch wrote:
>>
>> Trying to help my girlfriend who's using 10.3.9 - yesterday she  
>> discovered that all of the sent mail from one of her accounts was  
>> gone. She restarted Mail a couple of times, and I think she got an  
>> error message the first time (I wasn't there) that said something  
>> about the index. She dismissed it. :(
>>
>> Anyway, so now I'm trying to help. I copied the whole ~/Library/ 
>> Mail directory to another part of her disk for safety. The Sent  
>> Mail mbox was 800MB, so I know the sent mail must still have been  
>> there. I tried rebuilding the mailbox in Mail, but nothing  
>> happened. So then I tried restarting her iMac... now the Send Mail  
>> mbox is showing only 88KB !! Help!! Oh, wait I did the backup,  
>> good. So, I go to the backup... and... S*@# - it's only 88KB now  
>> too!!! Help!!!
>>
>> Is all that sent mail now gone? Is there some way to recover it?  
>> Any ideas that might help me get out of the doghouse!!!
>
> Blimey! At least I'm not alone.
> I checked my sent items yesterday to find that everything after  
> June 30th 2004 was missing.
>
> This is true for sent items in both my accounts, both of which are  
> IMAP, but does not appear to affect any other mailboxes (my "read  
> items"). I was blaming the problem on kMail on my Linux laptop,  
> which was connected to this server yesterday for the first time in  
> ages. Now I wonder if Mail.app is at fault.
>
> The messages have been deleted from the server, as they are missing  
> whether I check from Mail.app on my Powerbook, PowerMac, Thinkpad  
> or by webmail. I'm really quite annoyed at myself for not having a  
> backup, because I've been "meaning to get around" to automating  
> that for a while now.
>
> Unfortunately, I'm not able to help with your problem, as even  
> missing the messages my Sent Items shows 1514 messages:
>
>   $ pwd /Users/stroller/Library/Mail/IMAP- 
> stroller at mail.stroller.uk.eu.org/INBOX/Sent.imapmbox/CachedMessages
>   $ du -sh .
>   8.5M    .
>   $ ls -1 | wc -l
>       1515
>   $
>
> I may now try checking the cache on my laptop, but I'm frankly not  
> optimistic.
>
> Stroller.
>
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