Some Mail Messages show up as 2 message - but only to Applescript

l008com · January 5, 2026, 5:29am

I’ve had this problem for a long time and I’ve just been ignoring it but maybe nows a good time to try to work it out.

I have a script that works with the current selected email. Go to a mailbox, click on one email, activate script.

Usually this works fine, but maybe 10% of the time, the email will show up to applescript as 2 separate emails. In Mail.app, it only ever shows up as one message. And its not showing as two because its a multipart message. In fact nearly identical emails can show up both ways.

Has anyone ever dealt with this before, or know what might be going on?

I’m attaching two images. Each image contains the full raw source of an email, and then the applescript result when just that one email is selected and you ‘log selection’

NOTE: These emails are junk mail and the attachment is almost certainly a virus, so do not try to reconstruct the file.

l008com · January 9, 2026, 11:42am

Anyone have any thoughts on this one? It is very repeatable (on my primary machine). I don’t have my full email setup on many other Macs but I suppose I can check. Although this has been a problem with this script for years, on many previous OSes so I’m pretty sure its widespread. Widespread, among applescript coders that specifically try to get info on the currently selected email

robertfern · January 9, 2026, 6:56pm

Post your script. Cant resolve it without.

l008com · January 9, 2026, 9:16pm

The script is literally in the screen shots. “tell mail to get selection”, that’s it. With one email selected in the mailbox, sometimes the result is a list of one item, but sometimes its a list of two items.

robertfern · January 9, 2026, 9:52pm

Do you have “Organize by Conversations” turned on?
That is most likely the issue

l008com · January 9, 2026, 10:08pm

Nope never, I haaaaaate that feature.

Camelot · January 14, 2026, 9:33pm

Two observations, here…
First, I ran a little script to run in the background to poll Mail.app for the selection, and flag any time I had >1 message selected:

tell application "Mail"
	set msg_count to 0
	repeat until msg_count > 1
		delay 0.5
		set sel_msg to get selection
		set msg_count to count sel_msg
	end repeat
end tell

In over two hours of running, it never triggered until I manually selected two messages (to check that my script was actually functioning as expected )

So I don’t think it’s an endemic problem with Mail.app, per se.

Secondly, the two messages ARE different… The headers, sender’s IP, the timestamps… the Message-IDs…

so the question is why is Mail grouping them together and not showing them separately.

There must be something significant about these messages. I think you need to spend a little time looking at the specific messages that trigger this condition - are they all related to the same spam/scam?
Are they all from fake users? does it ever flag for actual contacts you know (I realize you’re probably not running your script against ‘valid’ emails, but I think it warrants some deep-diving).

l008com · January 14, 2026, 11:35pm

For me its not two messages showing as two messages.
Its one message showing as two. Also fun fact, I’m discovering that sometimes it’s three. I’m looking at one of those messages right now.

I only use my script ON spam messages, so I don’t know how often it happens to ‘regular’ emails. However these junk mails do look normal and I don’t really know what to make of this.

Here is the applescript and result from one of the triple emails:

tell application "Mail" to get selection

Result:

{message id 189417 of mailbox "Junk" of account id "2BA5AC83-3B87-486A-8787-0C85E301E6D8" of application "Mail", message id 189420 of mailbox "Junk" of account id "2BA5AC83-3B87-486A-8787-0C85E301E6D8" of application "Mail", message id 189419 of mailbox "Junk" of account id "2BA5AC83-3B87-486A-8787-0C85E301E6D8" of application "Mail"}

The email, raw source below, is a multipart message with a plain text portion and an html portion. But the very next email in this mailbox has the same multipart setup with two pieces, and it displays as one email, not two or three, when selected.

X-Original-To: [redacted]
Delivered-To: [redacted]
Received: from akron.kapomelyn.digital (unknown [98.159.108.178])
by mail.macfixer.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 86FAE6D8C495
for <[redacted]>; Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:11:14 -0500 (EST)
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed/relaxed; s=k1; d=kapomelyn.digital;
h=Mime-Version:Content-Type:Date:From:Reply-To:Subject:To:Message-ID; i=newsletter@kapomelyn.digital;
bh=MbasMIFi1wPpM1F/pQtROcs66n0=;
b=ouCiX5Xa1nVxbodUG/RcS/EaktwUV1kJ2m/PLD3N1rB3Mr52CLnK0rG1PnxXU7o9XozOXMqqdqg2P62VcNty08bthod2ZNJo7UvmAckG/xbNKBvrUsqP0Y4rCXSpT8RvSD3K5KroY+9JhtHB1MWc46BOAAPVxrwCKWLFgZX2JBJqHDn2cGQhpwWt8ZY0j24LgJGxHo1N/wIl/GW1i8bw0cLMAY984qke1+RBYQ5UoJAozlCYCoQrWjT7EDqMWRExtMZ5w6xs9Y4uXa0qA3QXVjJCB/pNFVVy3AP0nrZKiB8/a5HkgnYzG0gG7ihTsoGXcklDtN/yMWYHy4y/buY57Q==

DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; q=dns; s=k1; d=kapomelyn.digital;
b=phO2JMcv5CnHM/4zd+Wi5rqNfianOv/VoWOLHJUQNap+4qrrXOqQqrR6amfvBigvWm9IXVM5mxN5wbNgxYmPnBRIpwvDmv41h20IDHOxxcbR7m26bCf4MH/G34HKx7mNvxOzIihy1Vpf1ZoTiqAEmWI2DZJ/Y1PixPHcIZfs0aEd/P3GW8Aey3cABOsT94KAPfkEMthpQFBUO4H/GcqOPuhG+qai1ZPNbWY5khnq3vktvHciaP2TzacoS10AmlJSvABsG9fjq79RbNUYb20fgeh6I70cuZzll/dt/iYDmsy6nKz1yWN54MP0GoPDc44EEvzzH9h5GGI6cNu+I+Jw0A==;

Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="fad7c3320fcb5023c5649bee70420988"
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2026 12:11:11 -0600
From: "Swollen Prostate" <newsletter@kapomelyn.digital>
Reply-To: "Swollen Prostate" <newsletter@kapomelyn.digital>
Subject: BPH complication forced me to find the prostate relief
To: <[redacted]>
Message-ID: <qw9hxv44dpavv473-h54ri2sbfgho60nu-1e3@kapomelyn.digital>

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Camelot · January 15, 2026, 6:38pm

Its one message showing as two

It is not one message showing as two…

{message id 189417 of mailbox "Junk" of account id "2BA5AC83-3B87-486A-8787-0C85E301E6D8" of application "Mail",
message id 189420 of mailbox "Junk" of account id "2BA5AC83-3B87-486A-8787-0C85E301E6D8" of application "Mail",
message id 189419 of mailbox "Junk" of account id "2BA5AC83-3B87-486A-8787-0C85E301E6D8" of application "Mail"}

The result clearly shows (in this case) three different messages, with three different message IDs - 189417, 189420, and 189419

So clearly Mail.app thinks it’s three messages.

Since it is spam, and there’s no guarantee that the spammer is following the rules of SMTP, I’d look a little more closely at the messages. For example, do they have different Message-IDs? The Message-ID is supposed to be unique, but if the bad actor is reusing the same Message-ID then that could, potentially, trip up Mail.app, if it’s associating the two messages as being the same ID.

l008com · January 15, 2026, 11:27pm

do they have different Message-IDs?

There is only ONE email in my inbox. It has a message ID and because theres only one email, it is unique. These aren’t three different emails I can look at. Only applescript sees multiple messages. In the mail app itself, its just one regular old individual email.

If you’re asking me to check the message ID of every other email in my mailbox to see if any are duplicates, obviously I can’t or at least don’t know any practical way to do that.

Camelot · January 16, 2026, 8:00pm

If you’re asking me to check the message ID of every other email in my mailbox to see if any are duplicates, obviously I can’t or at least don’t know any practical way to do that.

No, I’m only suggesting that for the cases where the script reports multiple messages.

In your earlier examples, the messages do have different IDs as far as AppleScript is concerned. It shouldn’t be too hard to dive into those and hopefully identify some anomaly.

{message id 189417 of mailbox "Junk" of account id "2BA5AC83-3B87-486A-8787-0C85E301E6D8" of application "Mail",
message id 189420 of mailbox "Junk" of account id "2BA5AC83-3B87-486A-8787-0C85E301E6D8" of application "Mail",
message id 189419 of mailbox "Junk" of account id "2BA5AC83-3B87-486A-8787-0C85E301E6D8" of application "Mail"}

I’d take a look at these messages to start with, since you say Mail is identifying them as a single entity.

l008com · January 17, 2026, 3:32am

I posted the raw source of one of these emails in the first post. Looks normal to me. I don’t even know what I’d be looking for because I don’t know what kind of anomaly would even be capable of doing this.

Camelot · January 23, 2026, 6:44pm

I posted the raw source of one of these emails in the first post.

But only one of them.

You need to look at all of them together to look for differences. Chances are they have some difference, but maybe (incorrectly, on the part of the sender) have the same Message-ID SMTP header.

For example, in your first post, Mail returned message ids 188538 and 188540. You need to ask for each of those items in turn and compare them.