Monday, November 19, 2007

Messages in Apple Mail are grayed out not deleted

This one bothered and baffled me for a couple of days...

In Apple Mail messages that I attempted to delete were not removed from the inbox.  Instead they turned gray.  Same with messages marked as Spam, just grayed out.

I thought this was surely a data corruption of some sort and tried the usual maintenance tricks:

+ Reboot

+ Repair permissions

+ rebuilt Mail index (Mailbox > Rebuilt)

+ vacuumed the SQLite database in Terminal:

/usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum


Still no joy. 

Turns out this is a "feature not a bug".

There is actually a way to turn this behavior on and off:

Mail: View > Show Deleted Messages

It is toggled by Command + L

I think that I must have tripped over the Command + L keystroke at some point and inadvertently activated this feature.  I am sure I will not be alone in being puzzled by the result!

It does appear that this feature was in 10.4 I just never noticed before...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

That might be the problem for some people, but for most people it has nothing to do with that "feature"; they can see the grayed-out message regardless.

The likely solution would be to do a rebuild of your Mail index file be going to ~/Library/Mail/ and deleting Envelop Index, then relaunching Mail, after which it will rebuild that index from scratch and hopefully get rid of those deleted but visible messages.

Anonymous said...

Thank you Peter. Command + L did the trick. I've put up with this feature for months! Thank you for sharing.

Anonymous said...

Thank you!!! This has been driving me crazy for a while. Huge help.

Anonymous said...

This worked for me!

thanks! Huge help1

Tara Rodden Robinson said...

Just goes to show that a good helpful post can be the gift that keeps on giving. :) Thanks!!