On 18/03/2010, at 7:23 PM, Rosemary Horton wrote: > My Mail has decided to become really flaky. Many of my rules don't work, but > worst of all is how it now handles Junk. > Despite having a preference to say remove into my junk folder, now it leaves > them in my Inbox, and not even marked properly. I have to actually select > each one before it shows me it's junk. > > I guess I can trash the preferences, but that would lose all my rules and > accounts > -- > Rosemary Horton > rosemary.hor...@gmail.com
Hi Rosemary, You don't say what version of Mail you are using, or what OS X Tiger, Leopard or Snow Leopard. Without knowing what version of Mail … you could try moving these files to the trash, but DON'T empty the trash until you know the problem has been rectified. Please read these instructions carefully, perhaps print them FYI. There is probably some corruption in one or more of the files used by the junk filter. The following procedure thoroughly gets rid of all those files, so that Mail creates them anew: 1. Quit Mail. 2. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Mail/. (the tilde symbol "~" indicates your Home folder) 3. Locate LSMMap2 and move it to the Trash. This file stores information about what does and doesn't constitute junk, and is what allows the junk filter to learn. Clicking the Reset button in Preferences > Junk Mail also deletes LSMMap2. The file was called just LSMMap in early versions of Mail, delete that as well if you see it. 4. Locate DefaultCounts and move it to the Trash. This file keeps statistics about the number of messages that have been marked as junk, either automatically by the junk filter or manually by the user. 5. Locate MessageRules.plist and move it to the Desktop. This is where Mail 2.x stores all rules, including those used by the junk filter. If there is a file called MessageRules.plist.backup, move it to the Desktop too. You may also see MessageSorting.plist files there; this is where Mail 1.x stored the rules, and they are no longer used by Mail 2.x, so just move them to the Trash if you see them. 6. Look for the account folders. The name of each account folder starts with the account type (POP, IMAP, Mac), followed by the account username and the incoming mail server. Open each of the account folders, locate the Junk.mbox or Junk.imapmbox folder within it, and move it to the Trash if present. 7. Go to ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/. Locate any Junk.mbox folders there (their name may include the account name in parenthesis), and move them to the Trash. Note: Messages in Junk folders with an .mbox suffix are stored locally, and will be lost forever as a result of doing steps 6 and 7. If there is a chance that you have legit messages there and you want to preserve them, move them to another mailbox in Mail first. Messages in Junk folders with an .imapmbox suffix are stored on the server and can be deleted blindly (Mail will rebuild them automatically). 8. Open Mail. As a result of removing the rules file, the junk filter will be disabled now. You may want to either tell Mail to go offline immediately after opening it, or shut down the Internet connection before opening Mail, to prevent it from downloading anything until the junk mail filter has been enabled again. 9. Go to Mail > Preferences > Junk Mail, enable junk filtering, and configure it however you wish. 10. Go online again if you went offline in step 8. If the above solves the problem and you don't have any rules you'd like to preserve or recreating them is not a daunting task, just delete the MessageRules.plist files that were moved to the Desktop and be done with it. Cheers, Ronni 17" MacBook Pro Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz / 4GB / 800MHz / 500GB OS X 10.6.2 Snow Leopard Windows 7 Ultimate (under sufferance) -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au>
