Mail mboxes showing up empty

[Kevin Broderick]

On 4 Oct 2006, at 10:54 PM, Kevin Callahan wrote:

> My BIL sends me complaints about Mail on a regular basis.  There's  
> always one problem or another.  None of his issues show up on my  
> systems with the exception of how Mail handles misspelled words.
>
> He just sent me a picture that depicts several mboxes showing up  
> empty:
> [CHOMP]
> I said I'd ask if others get this empty mailbox behavior, and if  
> so, how common is it?

*raises hand*

I've seen it on more than one occasion; usually, it seems related to  
a connection getting "stuck", whereby any additional tasks I tell  
Mail to do will end up in the Activity Monitor queued behind a fetch  
task that shows active...and doesn't seem to ever complete.  My  
suspicion is that there's a timing issue whereby a network  
connectivity problem at exactly the right moment will leave Mail  
waiting indefinitely for a remote connection to provide some data.

When this happens (as it did last night, actually--Mail was stuck  
when I came into the office this morning), I usually can't even do a  
normal Quit on Mail--I have to Force Quit.  Once I restart, things  
seem to be hunky-dory for some amount of time, usually long enough  
that I don't consider this a tremendous problem (although it is a  
major annoyance).

Kevin Broderick
omnilist at kevinbroderick.com
http://www.kevinbroderick.com/