In the last week I have received 3 emails that i cannot delete from my inbox. It says that the (pickyournumber)".emlx could not be opened because there is no such file" when I try to delete it. When I mark it as spam, it just shows back up the next time I open the mail. Sure, it is spam colored then, but did not stay where it belonged (well, where I had directed it).
I then went into the library to look for the files, found one of them and deleted it from there. That was when I still had only 2 of these monsters. Soooo, when I started the application back up, that very email showed back up, now as a brandnew email with a new time stamp. Later the original that I had deleted from the library data file returned, too.
I have emptied out just about everything I can empty in the library, but it is giving me no relief, so to speak..

I run El Capitan on a machine that is about 3 months old. Since this machine is used for a home business, I would really rather not annihilate the whole mailbox system, because there is too much to be saved. Unless I must.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Hi, and welcome to FineTunedMac.

As a first step, I'll suggest that you try selecting your inbox and rebuilding it with Mail > Mailbox > Rebuild.

Failing that, is there anything unusual about your persistent emails that might give us a clue into their nature?

Hi, thank you for getting back to me.

All of the emails actually have nothing showing in the message field. They are also supposed to have attachments, that show up on the email list, but those are also absent. One of them appears as a DHL generated email; that one will not even show any raw source. The other 2, which are identical, seem to originate from signmaxqatar.com, and there are many references to it in the source material.

I am thinking that rebuilding the inbox might not work real well for this computer, since I have removed many of the emails that are saved on this one from the server itself, so I am thinking they would be lost. As a last resort, and considering what this is doing (who knows what these messages are really doing), it may be the only choice in the end.

I have not yet gone into our server to see what those messages look like there. I suppose it will be a logical step to take? I am just at a loss on this one...

You may get a bit more insight about rebuilding mailboxes from Mail problems.

Thank you, I'll check that out, to be sure.

Do you know if it is possible to just restore the mail from the time machine, that way only altering the last week or so that has not been backed up, but also has not been removed from the server?

I did, by the way, go onto the server and deleted the offending emails from it, so they should not show back up.

I just thought of another peculiar behavior these emails had. If you highlighted them in the list, (and this is before opening them, because usually these things are discarded without even being opened) they immediately showed up as opened (you know, no more blue dot) as the message that the ######.emlx did not exist etc. etc.

Is this an IMAP or POP account?

Just to take a more simple-minded approach (and the first one I'd try), wouldn't trapperlarr be better off just to end the problem at the source? That is, if it was me, I'd go to my Mail>Preferences>Rules and create a rule that deletes those emails so that they never even arrive on my computer.

Would that be possible in an instance such as this in which the emails in question come from multiple sources?

I'm assuming so, as trapperlarr's original post doesn't indicate that they are coming from different senders. He had three and, when he did one removal, the same email showed up but with a different timestamp.

Sometimes junk mail will keep getting sent by the same sender but they change the sender name slightly. For example, I could be getting junk from Spamsender@whoneedsthis.com.

When I set the rule to delete mail from Spamsender@whoneedsthis.com they might keep sending from Spamsender-2@whoneedsthis.com, et cetera.

In that case my rule will not include the changeable part of the address and I will set it to delete mail from @whoneedsthis.com. Works great.

You missed post #44480...

So, for two of the emails, trapperlarr could choose to delete anything that comes from @signmaxqatar.com. For the other, he could look through the choices in the Rules function and see if something else would work. There are about 25 choices.

I get your point, but it works only if trapperlarr can count on future spurious emails coming from none but the same sources; otherwise, it could conceivably generate a list of rules a mile long.

I don't think a long list is an issue. I have about 15 rules, and each contains 20 to 25 addresses that are auto-deleted. These are the sum total of a few years of dealing with all junk mail this way.

I may have lots of addresses in my delete Rules but there's also something I no longer have - spam. I hear people talk about getting 20, 30, 50 pieces a day and I am glad to say I only get it once in a while. And then it's a one-time visit because "into the Rule it goes".

Depends on your point of view, I guess.

I can't speak for trapperlarr , but I prefer to get to the root of a problem and not fall back on a workaround unless it's absolutely necessary.

If trapperlar's problem is just a basic spam issue with which hir ISP can't deal, yours is the way to go, but if it's some other sort of problem, best for it to be solved.