January 3, 2011

HOWTO Fix a 'Mail has undone actions' IMAP error

When using OS X Mail on Leopard with IMAP, it is possible to get Mail.app into a bad state with respect to the server. When this happens, Mail will start displaying an extremely-hard-to-dismiss dialog that resembles:

Mail has undone actions on some messages so that you can redo the actions while online.

Additional information: The IMAP command "UID COPY" (to Deleted Items) failed for the mailbox "Junk E-mail" with server error: Command Error. 10.

For the benefit of the entire Internets, here is the solution.

  1. Close Mail.app.

  2. Open a terminal and cd ~/Library/Mail/.

  3. In this directory is a subdirectory that is called something like IMAP-youremail@yourmailserver. (Or if you’re living dangerously and/or stupidly like me, Exchange-youremail@yourmailserver). cd into this directory.

  4. cd .OfflineCache/ and rm everything in this directory.

You’re welcome!

Comments

  1. I’m having this problem and I followed all the step when I go into the mail server directory, it returned the following:

    usage: rm [-f | -i] [-dPRrvW] file … unlink file

    But it didn’t work. Any thoughts?

    Thanks!

    Posted by Anonymous on Oct. 06, 2011 at 7:50 AM [#]

  2. I’m Anonymous from above. Even though the Terminal method above did not work for me, I found a way to do the exact same thing. Used Finder’s Go To Folder to open the Offline Folder and deleted all the files manually.

    Finder > Go > Go To Folder > ~username/Library/Mail/IMAP-youremail@yourmailserver/.OfflineCache

    Thanks!

    Posted by Denise on Oct. 06, 2011 at 8:04 AM [#]

  3. Sorry about that, Denise — my instructions were for people who like working in Terminal, so I was lazy and didn’t include the full rm command. But yes, your method of manually deleting files via the Finder will do the trick too. Nice work! :)

    Posted by Evan on Oct. 06, 2011 at 8:11 AM [#]

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