On 2026-02-14 at 07:16:34 UTC-0500 (Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:16:34 +0000)
Martin S Taylor <[email protected]>
is rumored to have said:
This morning I needed to restore my hard drive (using Time Machine) to
the state it was in yesterday. After restoring, I found that MailMate
crashed repeatedly and consistently shortly after I launched it. I
tried rebooting the computer, but this didn’t help. However, after
about maybe twenty relaunches of MailMate the problem went away.
Except…
I now find the cache of IMAP messages is corrupted, so that all my
mailboxes appear empty when I use MailMate (although they are fine
when I access them using some form of Webmail, or Apple Mail.
It's likely not the message cache per se, but the complex index into it,
which MM refers to as the Database. You can't just restore the Messages
and Database from a file-based backup, apparently because the Database
refers to file IDs or inodes or some other low-level access vector to
find message files, rather than pathnames that would be preserved in a
restore.
The fact that you could make it "work" with many restarts seems ominous
to me, but the fact that the messages are really there on the server is
reassuring. It's not clear to me whether you'll need to re-download
everything, or if you can just rebuild from the local message cache (see
below)
Is there a way I can force MailMate to update its local copy of the
IMAP messages?
From the MailMate Help:
Manually resetting MailMate
It is also possible to manually trigger database rebuilding. The
following
Terminal commands are similar to what MailMate does when being
asked to
rebuild:
rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/MailMate/*.tmp
printf "OldDatabase" > ~/Library/Application\
Support/MailMate/.rebuild.tmp
Then restart MailMate. When the rebuilding has finished, you should
take a
look at the contents of the following folder:
~/Library/Application\ Support/MailMate/OldDatabase/
Again, if you had to do this due to what you think is a MailMate bug
then
please report it.
This is not a fast process. It is faster than wiping everything and
re-downloading the mail.
--
Bill Cole
[email protected] or [email protected]
(AKA @[email protected] and many *@billmail.scconsult.com
addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire
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