Troubleshooting Email

Why does Apple Mail show read messages as unread?

  • Published: 8th May, 2009
  • Modified: 6th July, 2009
  • Article ID: 112
 
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Symptom

My IMAP account in Apple Mail shows messages that I previously marked as read as unread.

Resolution

This is a common bug with Apple Mail. The mail application fails to correctly set the read flag on mail in your IMAP account.

At the time of writing Apple has not fixed this error.

A work-around is to scroll through each email. This resets the read flag to unread for each message.

Until Apple fix this issue in Mail we recommend using POP3 or an alternative mail application like Thunderbird or Entourage.

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2 Responses to “Why does Apple Mail show read messages as unread?”

  1. Kamal Premaratne says:
    8th October, 2009 at 8:13 pm

    Actually, a solution appears in:
    http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5653148

    But I am not sure if it works for 10.6 (Snow Leopard). I was not aware of the above solution, and I contacted Apple about the problem. In my case, the problem arose with an Exchange account only. Here is the sequence that the gentleman at Apple suggested:
    (a) Go to Mail menu > Mailbox > Rebuild. The unread count disappeared. He gave me a direct phone number and asked me to call again if the problem persists. It did, and I called again.
    (b) This time around, this is what he suggested: Quit Mail completely; open up a new Finder window and go to /Users/your_home_directory/Library/Mail/ and trash the file Envelope Index; close the Finder window and relaunch Mail; it comes up with the "Welcome to Mail" message and you ask it to continue. That’t it. The unread count has disappeared.

    I am not sure if it will pop up again. If it does, I will be calling again.

  2. Webmaster says:
    12th October, 2009 at 9:40 am

    @Kamal Thanks for the link URL and hope you’ve got your MS Exchange box working now.

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