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The Mystery of the Undeletable Draft Mail on Leopard

Oh darn

Have any of you encountered this problem? I’ve had a ghost draft mail sitting on my mailbox for several days and it just wouldn’t want to go away. Here are two ways to solve the issue:

The first is to simply highlight the email and click on the REBUILD option. The mail will disappear. If this still does not happen, you can check out this post of onkeljonas from Ars Technica that shows you how to do it:

Poking around ~/Library/Mail/ showed that while Mail still showed the 1 unread message, it didn’t actually exist รขโ‚ฌโ€œ it turns out that Mail needs a file to delete to be able to properly update the messagecounts and lists, and for some reason a mail file had disappeared by itself.
Here is a fix:

1) Navigate to ~/Library/Mail/
2) Open BackupTOC.plist, and figure out which of the entries under Root/messages is the borked one
3) Look at the kMDItemPath and make a note of the last part (xxx.emlx)
4) Open Mail, make a new draft, quit Mail
5) Navigate to ~/Library/Mail/[account]/Drafts.mbox/Messages/, make a copy of the draft you just created (don’t just rename it, or you’ll have to redo the process). Make sure the copy is in the correct mbox (in my case that was Drafts, so I didn’t have to move it) and name the copy using the note from step 3.
6) Open Mail, delete the offending email, profit!

The real problem here is how a mailfile went missing in the first place, but I’ll attribute it to some rare Mail bug involving empty messages.

Ho-hum. These are Leopard blues. I must admit, in terms of stability Leopard isn’t what Tiger used to be.

By Jayvee Fernandez

Jayvee Fernandez is a tech enthusiast and sitting Techbology Editor for The Philippine STAR.

He is also an EAN certified SCUBA Diver and underwater photographer based in Metro Manila, Philippines. His photos and videos have appeared in various international and local publications including Random House Germany, Discovery Channel Canada, and CNN.

5 replies on “The Mystery of the Undeletable Draft Mail on Leopard”

ah, so Mac has this concern too? but i think it is not as blatant as Vista’s WinMail. they also have the issue of un-deletable email lurking in the inbox.

That’s probably why I haven’t updated to Leopard. I’m currently happy with Tiger. I’ll probably wait for 10.5.5 or something I guess. Maybe mid year. ๐Ÿ™‚

Although in my Mail, the junk never deletes. I don’t know why. I’m using that httpmail thing for my hotmail.

yes! i have been deleting that undeletable draft message for so long! You’ve saved my life! Thank you!

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