Apple Mail Inbox Has 4 Billion Messages
Help! My Apple Mail Inbox shows 4 Billion messages in a few of my email accounts. Now, I know I’m a popular person but this is a bit ridiculous. And truly, there are only about 10 messages in the inbox. Two of my accounts show up normally, and two have this bizarro high number showing up in the header. Every time I click away from the inbox and back in, the number changes slightly. I’ve searched around and cannot find a solution to this one. My main concern is that these phantom messages are eating up precious hard drive space – but it doesn’t seem like they are.
If anyone has had this issue and successfully solved it – please do share your solution in the comments. I would greatly appreciate it!
I have the exact same problem, and the number of messages is similar: 4,294,959,373.
My Mail app is doing the same thing. Rebuilding the mac mail box temporarily solves the problem, but the 4 billion + count will eventually return.
I think I might have figured it out – if you go into the Mailbox drop down menu and select “erase deleted messages” either in all accounts or in the particular account that has the gazillion messages – the count becomes accurate.
Somehow I think it has something to do with how mailbox behaviors are set up in account preferences which causes a ton of deleted messages to not actually be deleted.
There is not much guidance out there as to how mailbox behaviors should actually be configured for different email services. I finally through in the towel and primarily use the gmail web interface instead of apple mail. I do have one account set up with apple mail so that I can easily send mail to the people in my address book. But I am frustrated to no end. Apple should be easier than this!