Deleting Mail In Trash Folder

I have run into an interesting bug in Mail that started with Ventura. I move mail I have read to my trash folder and then delete the mail out of the trash folder. If I have a lot of mail to delete, after the delete runs, the Trash mailbox still shows some “debris” - messages changed to (No Sender) and (No Subject). You can see a sample below. The mail is actually deleted - if I view the inbox and then back to Trash, it is empty. It looks like Mail forgets to clear the view in Trash. If there are only a few items, no problem. If there are many items, most disappear, but some are left behind like this. I had hoped Apple knew about this and the latest update to Ventura would fix it - but no. It still occurs. This isn’t a major problem, but it is irritating. And it is not just my MBP - it also occurs on my macStudio.

I’m curious about whether anyone else has seen this, or if I am just “special”.

I have not actually seen it myself despite quite heavy use of Mail (in 13.1). But I guess there might be a couple differences. Do you only see this in the All Trash folder or also in the individual trash of a specific account? Do you only see this with iCloud email or also with eg. Gmail or Exchange trash?

I’m not seeing the (no sender) (no subject) in trash after emptying it (something I never actually do), but they do occasionally appear in my inbox view as I scroll. Sometimes switching to another folder and back fixes it, but what always fixes it is quitting mail and restarting. (On the M2 it’s amazing how fast that happens.)

This seems similar to a bug that showed up in early iOS 14 IIRC. Hopefully Apple is aware of this and a fix is coming.

I have a problem with deleting mail - only occurs once in awhile - but same problem for my wife who runs Ventura on similar MBP.

When I delete it, it still stays in the inbox. If I go to another folder (e.g. sent) and then back to my inbox it will be gone. It just stays in the inbox until I do that no matter how many time trying to delete.

David

I checked to see which of the trash folders was the problem - iCloud, gmail, or exchange. As soon as I check the specific trash mailboxes, the (No Sender) (No Subject) emails disappear. My guess is this is happening to the iCloud mail, as 95% of my mail goes to the iCloud mailboxes.

I have occasionally seen this happen when I delete junk mail (for the past several weeks I am seeing more mail in my Junk folder than in the Inbox).

David

For several versions of Mail and continuing in Ventura I often get mails come in that are empty. Sometimes if I quit and re-open Mail the content of the message will show, sometimes not. Always, such mails show up normally on my iPhone. It’s exasperating, and likely a sign of poor software quality at Apple (but I won’t get back on that hobbyhorse just now!)

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For me the emails are almost always in my ISP’s email account. Stuff that both my wife and I want to see go there. We each have separate private email accounts as well. I do have an iCloud email account as well, and don’t remember anything that goes there having this issue. (I subscribe to the nytimes from that account, so it’s almost always emails from them.)

I rarely go into individual email inboxes - I do almost everything from the global All Inboxes view. It’s only if I’m looking for something specific in an account that I’ll go to one of them.

The next time it happens I’ll pay more attention, though.

I have confirmed that these email headers show up after deleting trash in the iCloud mailbox. So it is Apple Mail (on the Mac) that seems to be the problem.

David

Also occasionally have a similar problem - Monterey. Messages deleted from iPad Mail often don’t get deleted on the server. Some actions apparently can trigger deletion on the server, but which actions specifically are unknown. As if the iPad is saving up deletes for some action that sometimes never comes. (Analysis done by having a web page open to the server’s Inbox and watching behavior.)

Perhaps this is why I haven’t seen your issue.

I don’t actually have the All Trash folder listed. I rarely actually check in on an individual Trash folder. Most of the time I’ll just hit shift-cmd-backspace every once in a while to clear out all the old crud. I do once in a while check on a Trash folder, but it’s always an individual Trash folder. Also, although I do have iCloud email, I get so little there, there’s usually nothing to trash (basically all of it goes to Archive). Most of my email is work and that’s all Gmail.

I realize this is not really helpful to you, sorry about that. So far just speculating why I’ve never seen it on my end. I’ll holler if anything else comes to mind you could try. But sure sounds like a bug to me right now.

It’s interesting you mention that because for me it’s exactly the other way around.

On my M1 MBP using Mail on 13.1 I never get empty messages. But on my 12 mini running the latest and greatest 16.2 (and for the longest time before actually) I’ll see empty messages a lot.

Usually it’s when network connection is poor. The iOS Mail app apparently doesn’t deal very gracefully with low b/w situations at all. So it will will show me N no. of new messages and in Mail I’ll see perhaps the from and subject of those N new messages, but if I then select one of them all I get is an empty page.

And often it’s quite a pain to get it to finally load the content of the message. Sometimes hitting the down and then the up arrows (basically taking you to the last read message and then back to the new email) can trigger it and sometimes just checking for new email again via swipe from top on Inbox (I always have push set to off and fetch to manual – only want auto fetch on my Mac, the phone would otherwise get to ‘chattery’) will get it to finally load and display. But every once in a while it will be really stubborn and just take forever for the message to finally show.

It would be nice if Apple modified their iOS apps to deal better with situations where there’s no wifi and you’re stuck on some single bar of LTE (or worse). Some of us do actually go out and about and not everybody lives/works in the middle of a bustling urban area.

Edit: just realized this is way OT, apologies @dredfearn.

I do even less. Gmail automatically deletes messages that have been in Trash for more than 30 days. The other mail services I use (Yahoo and Mail.com) have similar policies. So I never perform an “empty trash”. I just delete messages I no longer care about and let the server expire them 30 days later.

This way, I can go back and find it if I later discover that I needed it (I almost never discover this after 30 day), without retaining an infinite backlog of no-longer-useful messages.

I find deleting mail to be a waste of my personal CPU cycles. :slight_smile: The only messages I delete manually are test messages that I want out of my Gmail archive so they don’t confuse me in the future. I also have filters that automatically delete certain kinds of automated transactional messages—server status messages and the like. And every few years, I might look at a label for a mailing list I no longer follow and see if I care enough to keep the messages. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

But I do have to pay Google $20 per year for more storage.

Yes, but my OCD requires that I keep my trash folder empty! I find that the time spent going through my inbox is plenty to know whether I deleted something by mistake. Generally when I delete something I shouldn’t have I realize that immediately.

David

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I have a similar problem but it occurs in the Junk email folder. I have a lot of filters set in Mail to automatically delete emails w/particular From headers to prevent them from going directly to the Junk folder, where I’d then need to select them to send them to Trash; this way I never need to deal w/them. W/the increase in spam email at this time of year, it saves a lot of time.

Occasionally, several will still appear to show up in the Junk folder, w/No Sender, No Subject, as in your screenshot. However, the text area will be completely blank.But I can’t directly delete them, I need to move out of the Junk folder to another folder; then if I go back to the Junk folder, they’ll be gone.

Very similar to what you’re seeing, just happening in the Junk folder, not Trash.

Yes, when I have a lot of junk (like now for the past couple of weeks), the same thing happens when I delete the junk mail. And again, it is iCloud junk mail.

David