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:

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As he points out:

In Mail.app (the standard mail client on OS X), if the person sending an email to you hasn’t specified a ‘from name’ in their email client (or webmail), the email will show up as being from their raw email address even if their name and email address is in your Address Book. Additionally, if the person has specified a ‘from name’ different from their real name (i.e. a nickname or screen name) then that will show up in the from column.

So you get odd things like this:

Obviously this is visually annoying and sometimes less than informative.

It also throws a spanner in the works when sorting emails by name.

John suggests that the solution is easy:

The Mail User Interface needs the ability to choose either to use Address Book names when there is no supplied ‘from name’ or to always use Address Book names regardless of supplied from name, matching instead on the email address.

It makes you wonder why is hasn’t been fixed.mail.app, apple mail, bugs, From addresses, sorting, annoyancesSimilar Posts:

• AppleScript to clean up Address Book
• Snail Mail 1.5: Slick Address Book Envelopes
• “Show Emails from” Script for Address Book
• Cleaning up Mail’s Previous Recipients List
• Address Book and nicknames: three work-arounds