« Grammar of Tagging | Main | "Ajax" and the smoove user experience »
February 06, 2005
Junk Mail folder stops working on Mail.app in OS X
I recently had a strange problem: the Junk folder in Mail.app stopped behaving like a folder. It would indicate that messages were being filed there by the number in parentheses: “Junk(15)”, but when I would click on it, no messages would be listed. In fact the list view would say I had zero messages. I could empty the Junk folder, but I could never see those messages.
This page at Macintouch led me to the solution (scroll to the Decmber 13, 2004 entry by Jeremy TenWolde).
For some reason, my Junk.mbox file had lost its “.mbox” extension and wasn’t being recognized correctly by Mail anymore.
The solution was to browse to the file (~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/ or ~/Library/Mail/POP-{someaccount}/) and simply add the “.mbox” extension to the folder named “Junk”. Quit and relaunch Mail, and all was well.
I have no idea how Junk.mbox got renamed, that’s a little weird.
Posted by Andrew at February 6, 2005 04:05 PM