Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
4. Decide which mailbox you want to be the “real” Sent mailbox. The best way to do
this is to send a message from a webmail interface and see which mailbox it goes
into.
5. Whichever mailbox you identified in the last step, select it and choose Mailbox
> Use This Mailbox For > Sent. Mail moves it back to the server and reenables
the Store Sent Messages on the Server setting—there's no need to return to the
Preferences window.
6. Now go to the
other
Sent (or Sent Messages or whatever) mailbox that's still lis-
ted under that account in the sidebar. Select all the messages in it and drag them
to the Sent mailbox for that account under the unified Sent mailbox.
7. Wait until all the messages have finished copying (choose Window > Activity to
keep an eye on your progress). Then select the now-empty mailbox whose con-
tents you just moved, choose Mailbox > Delete Mailbox, and click Delete to con-
firm.
From now on, you shouldn't be troubled by duplicate mailboxes. (Remember, you can follow
almost exactly the same steps for other special mailboxes, such as Trash.)
Fix Mailbox Problems
Most of the time, Mail correctly displays all the messages in a mailbox when you select that
mailbox. If your mailboxes begin misbehaving, though—not showing messages you know
they contain or taking an extremely long time to show their contents, for example, you can
try some easy tricks to fix them.
If your
envelope index
—a special database that Mail uses to track which messages are in
which mailboxes—and the other files that Mail uses to catalog messages become damaged,
Mail may exhibit any of several symptoms, including:
• Missing messages
• Incorrect message counts, in which the number of unread messages shown next
to the mailbox name in the sidebar differs from the number of unread messages
you see inside the mailbox
• An empty mailbox, even though you know it contains messages
• Failure to move messages into a mailbox (manually or using rules)
If you suspect that a mailbox contains errors, the standard cure-all is to rebuild it. To do
this, select the mailbox (or mailboxes, by holding down the Shift key and clicking them) and
choose Mailbox > Rebuild.
