A simple and tedious fix to your Mail.app rule issues
Posted by Luke Cowell on December 20, 2007 at 08:48 AM
Some people have been having problems with the Mail.app rules in Leopard. Mail filtering rules somehow don't seem to be working the way they should.
A little sleuthing let me to a file in ~/Library/Mail called MessageRules.plist. This file contains all the rules you've created as well as the apple rules (eg. junkmail rules and 'news from apple' rules). What I noticed was that this file also contained very old rules that I had created, but were not visible in the rules list in Mail.app.
My hunch was that the file had become corrupt. So I removed it as well as MessageRules.plist.backup and restarted mail. I made some new rules and it worked! I actually think this issue may have started before I upgraded to leopard, so it's worth a shot in Tiger as well.
In Summary, remove these files:
~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist ~/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist.backup
Wait, that's not tedious! You said this would be tedious! OK, as promised here's the tedious part:
Go and remake all your rules in apple mail again.
Ta-Da!
Comments
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I was having that very problem, and this helped me fix it. Fortunately I didn't have a tonne of rules to re-create so it wasn't too inconvenient.
I think I might be dumb.
I'm hoping I'm blind. Because I can't find the MessageRules.plist.backup file.
Thus, my Mail problems continue.
How do I find this backup file?
What would you do?
I really, really appreciate any ideas you could give.
thanks.
It should be in your user account under Library/Mail. Are you in list view ? are you sorting by name ?
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