Mailbox Rules AWOL

Sorry to hear that. You should look for the following file:

~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Mailboxes.plist

If you quit MailMate then you copy back this file and it should still work with the rebuilt database.

I'm a bit puzzled how the rules in this file could be wiped out. Which mailbox(es) contained the rules?

If the rebuild requester appears again then please contact me. I'm always interested in finding any bugs which might trigger such behavior.

Mailboxes.plist restored, and rules are back. The rules are in the Inboxes of a few source accounts, and in at least one Inbox/sub-box; all were wiped out. Before switching to Mailmate I had developed an elaborate sorting system in my IMAP account folder structures, and so the rules I'm using in Mailmate are essentially legacy filters. Probably I'll transition to full usage of smart mailboxes -- eventually.

The rebuild requester followed about 36 hours after I deleted some file (had the letters "ham" in it, I think?) -- which the requester named as missing -- because my anti-virus (ClamXav) identified it as having a phishing virus.

Something else very strange happened, yesterday, with Mailmate -- no idea whether it's related. I was viewing my custom-made aggregate Inbox (which I label "INCOMING!"), when suddenly messages start deleting themselves, rapid-fire, like a machine gun, one after the other, about 2 or 3 message per second. I swear my hands were not touching the keyboard, but I don't remember what physical action I had just taken the second before the deleting started. I quit Mailmate, and manually restored all the messages, which were all in the Deleted Messages smart box.

Anyway, all seems to be working smoothly now. Thank you for your super-quick response!

Mark

Ok, the rebuild process might make the IMAP mailboxes temporarily disappear (which would also kill the rules of those mailboxes). I'll note to see if I can reproduce that.

The rebuild issue with ClamXav is a known issue and very tricky to fix. ClamXav is essentially removing files in the MailMate database and MailMate detects that (correctly) as a sign of database corruption. I've tried working around that by instantly checking that the file still exists after saving it, but apparently that is not good enough (which is not really surprising). Note that I cannot just refetch a missing message since that would lead to an infinite loop.

My advice is to not let ClamXav quarantine any files in the following folder. When MailMate shows an attachment then it is saved in a different location and then ClamXav is going to catch it there instead:

~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Messages

The repeating key I believe is an OS (or hardware) issue. I've seen it myself although not with the delete key. There is a discussion of it here although I don't really believe that their solutions are valid.

Thanks, Benny!

Hi, Benny,

ClamXav, which scans my Mac weekly, has again reported the same MailMate file -- the one with the word "ham" in it -- as infected:

~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Database.noindex/Headers/x-ham-report.cache: HTML.Phishing.Bank-573 FOUND

I won't take any action on it till I hear from you.

@Mark: This is even worse than I thought it could be. ClamXav flags one of the database files of MailMate. If such a file is removed then MailMate cannot (easily) recreate it. In my opinion, ClamXav is far too aggressive. There is, by the way, no way this file could be a virus. It's a simple plain text file.

The “good” news is that if it's removed then MailMate may crash or show the rebuild requester, but it'll be able to relaunch -- just without this part of the database. So I guess I'm not going to try to do anything about it, but you can tell ClamXav to ignore the following folder to avoid the warning in the future:

~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Database.noindex

I just excluded the ...Database.noindex folder

Thanks!