Many, many mail messages in multiple mailboxes show the sender as Safelite. (FWIW, I recently received multiple messages from Safelite, but none of them are in the mailboxes that show messages from Safelite.) When I choose Mailbox > Rebuild, as far as I can tell, nothing happens, and certainly it doesn’t fix the problem (even after Rebuild followed by quit and restart).
Any suggestions? This is on an almost new MacBook Air M3 running macOS Sequoia 15.1. The messages are in a Gmail account. Thanks for any help.
To be more clear, all the problematic mailboxes are in one Google account. Also, it appears that Safelite is replacing my name as the Sender (in many but not all cases); email to me shows the correct Sender. Also, I have restarted the Mac.
On a different Mac, the mailboxes appear correctly, so it seems like a Rebuild should fix this, but it doesn’t. As far as I can tell, Rebuild doesn’t do anything at all.
When I type Rebuild into the Help box in Mail, part of the returned search is the following.
When you rebuild mailboxes for IMAP or Exchange accounts, messages and attachments stored on your Mac are discarded, and then downloaded again from the mail server to your Mac. Your mailbox appears empty until the download is complete.
For the purposes of Mail and the Rebuild command, is Google Mail an IMAP account? If not, is there some way to force a mailbox rebuild?
Today, the problem seems to have cleared itself. There is only one change that seems to be even remotely related to the issue, and that’s that I sent an email to Safelite (about an unrelated issue). Anyone have a guess on why or even whether sending a message would have such an effect?
And I posted too soon. The original problem was that many of the messages that I had sent showed that they had been sent by Safelite. Now, messages that are addressed to me say they are addressed to Safelite. (I don’t see this until I open the message, since I don’t have a To column in my Inbox, or any other mailbox as far as I know.)
In both cases, somehow Mail associated my email address (username@gmail.com) with Safelite. It was doing that for messages that I had sent, and now it’s doing for messages I have received. I hope this added detail triggers some thought on how I should proceed.
Excellent question! (I should have thought of that.) The short answer is that my email address was in the Safelite contact card and removing my email address seems to have fixed the problem. Thank you.
The long answer is the short answer with a question. Why did Mail replace the Sender on many emails (but not all) with Safelite, but not the recipient (when the recipient was me), and then why did Mail reverse its behavior in both regards? As long as the problem stays fixed, I don’t care much, but I find it really odd. (On the other hand, I find many things about Apple Mail really odd. This is just a prominent tip of the oddity iceberg.)
I suspect it may become clear if you can read the original mail headers.
A header may or may not include a textual description of the e-mail address. For example, either of the following are valid:
From: foobie@example.com
To: barbie@example.com
or
From: "Foobie Bar Bazman" <foobie@example.com>
To: "Barbie Baz Fooman" <barbie@example.com>
I would guess that Apple Mail is using the description from the header, if it exists, but will look up a description by matching the e-mail address against your contacts if none is present.
If the address appears in multiple contacts, then it will probably use whichever one it sees first, which may not be in any particular order, depending on the internal data structure organizations.
In the absence of any additional information, I would guess that the messages that show the correct name have the name in the message header, and the ones where it provides “Safelite” (from your contacts) have only an e-mail address in the header.