You may not notice that anything is wrong unless you are looking at the particular mailbox or messages that are affected.īecause the data is synced to the server, problems can propagate to other Macs and iOS devices. These sorts of issues are pernicious because: But my advice is to hold off on updating to Catalina for now. I don’t know whether these are due to Mail bugs or to other factors such as problems on the Mac or with the mail server.

And eventually this syncs back to the first Mac, where the message disappears as well. If the message was moved to a server mailbox, other devices see the message as deleted. Moving messages between mailboxes, both via drag-and-drop and AppleScript, can result in a blank message (only headers) on the Mac. Updating Mail’s data store from Mojave to Catalina sometimes says that it succeeded, but large numbers of messages turn out to be missing or incomplete. Nevertheless, people contact me because it’s not unreasonable to wonder if third-party software is to blame, and I also hear from people who want a second opinion because what Apple support told them didn’t make sense. (Ironically, one of the bugs I’ve encountered is the inability to delete messages via AppleScript.) And, in fact, most of the damage has occurred without my Mail plug-in even being installed. Thankfully, none seem to be caused by my apps. I’ve heard a bunch of reports of data loss in Apple Mail. I’m working on more posts about the Catalina release, but I wanted to start with a short warning.

Transfer apple mail preferences