[MlMt] Rebuilding cache

[Bill Cole]

On 2026-02-14 at 07:16:34 UTC-0500 (Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:16:34 +0000)
Martin S Taylor <mailmate at lists.freron.com>
is rumored to have said:

> This morning I needed to restore my hard drive (using Time Machine) to 
> the state it was in yesterday. After restoring, I found that MailMate 
> crashed repeatedly and consistently shortly after I launched it. I 
> tried rebooting the computer, but this didn’t help. However, after 
> about maybe twenty relaunches of MailMate the problem went away. 
> Except…
>
> I now find the cache of IMAP messages is corrupted, so that all my 
> mailboxes appear empty when I use MailMate (although they are fine 
> when I access them using some form of Webmail, or Apple Mail.

It's likely not the message cache per se, but the complex index into it, 
which MM refers to as the Database. You can't just restore the Messages 
and Database from a file-based backup, apparently because the Database 
refers to file IDs or inodes or some other low-level access vector to 
find message files, rather than pathnames that would be preserved in a 
restore.

The fact that you could make it "work" with many restarts seems ominous 
to me, but the fact that the messages are really there on the server is 
reassuring. It's not clear to me whether you'll need to re-download 
everything, or if you can just rebuild from the local message cache (see 
below)

> Is there a way I can force MailMate to update its local copy of the 
> IMAP messages?

 From the MailMate Help:

Manually resetting MailMate

	It is also possible to manually trigger database rebuilding. The 
following
     Terminal commands are similar to what MailMate does when being 
asked to
     rebuild:

	rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/MailMate/*.tmp
	printf "OldDatabase" > ~/Library/Application\ 
Support/MailMate/.rebuild.tmp
	Then restart MailMate. When the rebuilding has finished, you should 
take a
     look at the contents of the following folder:

	~/Library/Application\ Support/MailMate/OldDatabase/
	Again, if you had to do this due to what you think is a MailMate bug 
then
     please report it.

This is not a fast process. It is faster than wiping everything and 
re-downloading the mail.


-- 
  Bill Cole
  bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
  (AKA @grumpybozo at toad.social and many *@billmail.scconsult.com 
addresses)
  Not Currently Available For Hire