Over at Rixstep 
, the blogger is in a fiesty mood. But in the midst of his claims about “a lot of buggy code in Mail.app” and how “Apple never respond with fixes”, he does raise a good point.
Snow Leopard, and Leopard before it, are not every good at deleting draft emails.
Its auto-save function leaves orphaned messages behind in its cache that are not registered in your Drafts folder (or on your IMAP server).
You can try this out for yourself.
First check your Drafts folder in Apple Mail and make sure that it looks empty.
Then open up your ~/Library/Mail folder, navigate to the Draft folder of your email account and open up the “Messages” folder. Although the folder shows iteslf empty in mail.app, in fact there are lots of auto-saved drafts in there!
Now if you are security conscious, or your work has particularly strict data management policies, then this is clearly a bad thing.
Otherwise, it’s just an annoying thing. They don’t do any harm but, still, Mail.app should be smarter than that.
Fortunately, the solution recommended by Rixstep–”you’ll have to go to the command line regularly to remove the orphans”–is not the only option.
There is a much easier way.
To remove the ghosts all you have to do is highlight the Drafts folder in Mail’s list of mailboxes on the left, and then select the Rebuild option from the Mailbox menu.
Poof! They’re gone.
Well, they are gone for the moment. You will need to do this again and again if the bug troubles you. And that’s the annoying part.
To make sure that is worked for you, you can check back in the Drafts folder of your Mail folder.
Mine looks good:
Euh… nope… that doesn’t work for me on 10.5.8… Messages are still there after I rebuild.
Yeah, same for me, also on 10.5.8., no “Poof! They’re gone” :-)
Umm.. Dude if you don’t think mail app is buggy you don’t use IMAP with an ISP other than .mac.
What about the bigger bug of mail autosaving messages to drafts and they ARE visible in mail app, not just the filesystem. I constantly have to go deleting them?
What about sent mail and recieved mail not syncing properly? I send a message on my mac, go to sent folder on my iphone and it’s not there…. Except sometimes it works… sometimes it doesn’t.
Why are you writing this stuff if you don’t ever use the mail app? If you send and recieve lots of emails you would know of a lot more bugs.