One thing I’ve noticed happen occasionally—but not often—with this script is that I sometimes see ghost messages: messages I’ve deleted from my inbox, and no longer appear in my inbox, but do get picked up by AppleScript.

I’m not sure exactly what’s going on here, because the messages do eventually disappear. They just don’t disappear immediately. What appears to be happening is that OS X Mail keeps trashed messages, in its internal SQLite database, in the folder they were trashed from.¹ And my guess is that when AppleScript asks for all messages from the inbox, Mail just returns a query on that database.

This is easy to check for in the AppleScript, however. Each message has a “deleted status” on it. If it’s true, the message has been deleted.

So replace the “repeat with pendingMessage…” line with:

It seems more than a little weird to be asking Mail specifically to ignore messages that don’t appear to be there in the first place. As far as I can tell, however, they are there, but the OS X Mail GUI is hiding them from you.