Back in the day, there used to be a ‘Mail on Mac’ problem where the flag count was NOT the same as the actual message count. The fix was to delete the plist - and it would magically reset.
‘Back in the day’ suggests the problem might be a thing of the past. Sorry - it isn’t.
It’s the ‘deleting the plist’ that is a thing of the past … at least for this bear - who has not been able to find it. And if you cant find it … you can’t delete it. Meanwhile the count variation has been getting worse.
Yesterday I spent some time trying to work out how to fix it.
SUCCESS.
Seems like ‘all’ you do is disconnect your Mac Mail from ‘The Cloud’ … ‘let a bit of time pass’ … whatever the hell that means … and reconnect - and all will be well.
Not Wrong. That’s what I did and voila. Fixed.
Two Caveats
In my particular case
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I replaced ‘let a bit of time pass’ with ‘reboot mac’.
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I didn’t worry for the first two hours after rebooting that most of my email is missing - but by then I had moved into panic. So switched on the ‘mail connection doctor’ and enabled ‘show detail’ … and indeed it was buzzing along - left it over night and today all back and flag count fixed. (Apparently I have a LOT of archived mail in my cloud).