Blank emails in El Capitan Mail.app

Question

After a few weeks of using El Capitan seemingly random messages started appearing blank. Viewing the messages in the Google web interface showed that they were not blank.

Restarting the app usually fixes it.

I deleted all my emails (by deleting mail folder ~/Library/Mail) and started again - and it was OK for about a week - and now it's started doing it again. Rebuilding mailboxes doesn't help.

I found links around the web to cases of this back in 2010/2011 - like this https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2364054

But it appeared to go unsolved.

Is this just a bug in El Capitan - and is there a solution?

Answer 1

To fix this issue there are two ways:

1. Rebuild

To rebuild a Mailbox in Mail, select the mailbox you want to rebuild and click on the Mailbox menu; at the bottom there is the Rebuild option. Repeat this step for each one of your Mailboxes.

It can take few hours to reindex a large mailbox and if it's an IMAP or Exchange mailbox, the rebuild will have to download again everything from the server.

2. Reindex

It is also often necessary to manually reindex Mail messages after a major OS upgrade. This is also necessary if Mail becomes unresponsive and/or if search is not functioning correctly or the app doesn't run.

1. Quit Mail if it’s open.

2. From the terminal run

   mkdir ~/Desktop/backup
   mv ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Envelope\ Index*  ~/Desktop/backup`
   

   (replace V2 with V4 for Sierra).

3. Launch Mail and it will build new Envelope Index files; that can take a long time if there are many messages to reindex and if it's an IMAP or Exchange mailbox, the rebuild will have to download again everything from the server.

If everything seems to be working correctly, you can now delete the backup from from your desktop (rm ~/Desktop/backup).

Answer 2

You could try to delete the whole Mail folder here: ~/Library/Mail

and delete the mail preferences files in

~/Library/Preferences

Then reconfigure the Mail. This will of course delete emails which are only saved locally. Instead of deleting you could of course close the app and move the files to another location for backup.

I've seen the same issue happening. The problem occured after switching the mail server. I had tried everything I could think of like rebuilding the mail box, deleteting the mailbox indexes, renaming mail boxes, force re-downloading the emails, re-adding the email account. The only thing that worked was deleting what i mentioned above.

Answer 3

I have this problem infrequently. Quitting and restarting mail.app fixes it and just takes a second. Another quick and dirty solution is to click on email forward which will let you see the email contents right away.

Answer 4

This is an old question but I landed here from a search; one thing that works for me sometimes when other solutions listed here don't is to move the email in question to a different account. The contents usually become visible immediately. You can then move it back (if you want to) and it will remain visible.

Answer 5

Most mail issues can be reduced to a specific fault with a little troubleshooting.

Open the connection doctor window in Mail.app and see if you can determine one specific mail host with issues.

Then set up a new user account with only that mail account and enable logging. At that point, you will know if you have a networking issue, a problem with one computer or a problem with one mail provider and your specific mail client.

Then you can decide to work with support for that mail provider, document the failure here with specific error messages and/or determine that you have a temporary issue that clears up over time due to capacity or temporary networking issues / delays / one host.