Mail and disappearing messages

TidBITS Talk
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Both my wife and I have experienced messages suddenly disappearing from Mail. For me it occurs either when sending it to Junk and then trying to return it to the Inbox, or sometimes when dragging a message to another mailbox. It doesn’t happen spontaneously. The missing message appears to have been deleted completely: it does not appear in the Trash or any other folder. Rebuilding the Inbox does not recover it, and using another mail client does not show it as still on the server. I keep my Inbox relatively clean, by filing away messages into other mailboxes and archives. For example, today I have my Inbox pared down to four messages, one came in to Junk (it wasn’t, an old patient looking for his chart), so I moved it to the Inbox and it disappeared. Luckily I was able to find his phone number and call him.

This is happening frequently enough that it is becoming a problem. Has anyone else experienced this?

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Are you using POP instead of IMAP or Exchange?
Do you have any scripts or actions that automatically delete items that land in Junk, etc.?

I don’t know if it is related, but I have noticed that Mail.app sometimes takes a long time to update mailboxes when moving messages around. It’s one of the things that leaves me hesitant to use Mail.app for my most important email accounts.

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Using IMAP on all accounts. I do have some rules for filtering out Junk, but I don’t think they would apply to the kind of messages that go missing. I know my wife never bothers to write such rules.

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Yes, sort of. I use SpamSieve and every once in a while I will move a message to the “TrainSpam” folder, which is supposed to re-train SpamSieve, but sometimes I will drop it in the wrong account’s TrainSpam folder.

Sometimes I find the missing messages in “Recovered Messages” in the “On My Mac” section on one of my machines.

Sometimes I am able to find it in Spamsieve’s Log and use the menu command to view in external viewer, and from there move it back to the In Box.

But this happens very, very infrequently.

I’ve also started, for my FastMail and Gmail accounts, using their respective apps to deal with marking messages as Spam or moving false positives back to the Inbox in each respective account. I don’t use Spamsieve for those accounts because they do a very good job server-side.

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Yes, two days ago most recently.

No POP; IMAP and one Exchange server. I’ve seen it happen on both IMAP and Exchange. No scripts or actions for automatically deleting anything in Mail.

It happens infrequently, but I would omit both uses of ‘very’. (Perhaps we have different feelings for when to use ‘very’.)

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I have. A few times when I try to move a message from one folder on Account A to a folder on Account B. My hunch is that it deletes the message on Account A and issue happened with a write on Account B. Poof, it is gone. Never to be seen anywhere. This has happened to me only on iOS, not on MacOS. Perhaps the network lost a control data packet on a poor cellular signal.

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And I’ve never seen it on iOS as I rarely use the phone for mail, so always on a Mac for me.

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Once or twice a year?

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More like once a month!

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I bought a brand new M4 iMac running Tahoe which I successfully downgraded to Seqouia. I migrated all my data successfully. But in Mail, whenever I select a message(s) and then click the trash icon in the top toolbar it disappears. Poof! It is nowhere to be found. Not in Trash or Junk or any other mailbox and it cannot be recovered by any method I’ve tried.

However, if I select the message(s), mark them Read, and then physically drag them to the Trash mailbox, no problem, they remain where I place them. I’ve found nothing online that references this particular problem. I will continue using this technique but it’s a hassle compared to just clicking the Trash icon. Oh by the way, it’s POP.

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For macOS Mail try rebuilding the Mailbox in case there is some minor corruption. First make sure you have a backup such as Time Machine.

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Rebuilding it does not return the missing message, nor does it prevent it happening again.

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This just happened to me (M4 MacBook Air, Tahoe 16.5.1, Mail 16.0, IMAP email through my ISP [Knology/WOW] ). I have my iCloud, Gmail and my ISP’s email accounts accessible through my Apple Mail app, so I see messages from all three in Mail. I found a new message (about Google Web App Activity Lawsuit) in my Gmail Junk folder that was not Junk. I ctrl-clicked on the message and chose ‘Move to Inbox’. It disappeared and did not reappear in any of my Inboxes or anywhere else. Luckily, I had glanced at it before moving it and remembered part of the sending email address (epiqnotice).

All my mailboxes are shown at the left of my Apple Mail window. When I entered the sending email address into the ‘Search’ field at the top right of the Apple Mail window, a new option (‘Search All Mailboxes’, which is usually not there) appeared at the top of my list of mailboxes at the left. I clicked on that and executed the search. My missing message appeared in the list of found messages along with a few others from that same sender.

In the displayed columns[1] of data about these messages I could see where they had been found. The others were in a folder under ‘On My Mac’ where I had moved them when I received them months ago (this folder is on my computer, not on any mail server).

The missing message was listed as being in the mailbox ‘All Mail’. I have not created any such mailbox nor do I see it in the list of mailboxes on the left of my Mail window. I manually opened each of my mailboxes (Gmail as well as the others) and did not see the message anywhere. Also, I clicked on the icon for ‘All Mailboxes’ in the left column and it did not appear in the list of messages (even though Search can still find it).

My conclusion is that Apple Mail knows about it (since its Search found it) but when I tried to move the message out of Gmail Junk my Mail app moved it out but didn’t reassign it to another mailbox (I had requested Gmail Inbox). It seems to be orphaned and only a global email search can find it.

I will eventually move it to the same folder On My Mac as the others, but I haven’t moved it yet (since that removes it from the mail server) in case anybody here has any detective suggestions so we might figure out what happened.

Update 2 hours later: The orphaned message has still not appeared in any mailbox including my Gmail Inbox where I told Mail to move it to.

Update next day: I accessed my Gmail via the web and, as with Apple Mail, the orphan message only appears when I click the icon in the left column for ‘All Mail’. It looks like it was Gmail that didn’t properly move it from Gmail Junk to Gmail Inbox.

  1. For those who don’t know, you can specify which attributes of your messages (From, Subject, Mailbox, etc.) should appear in your message list. Ctrl-click/right-click on the column titles in your message list and a pop-up menu will appear that allows you to display the attributes you prefer. ↩︎

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It might be as rarely as twice a year, but it feels like it’s more often. (I don’t keep a record of when a message goes missing; I just curse Apple for not devoting the resources to Mail to ensure it doesn’t happen.)

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Not addressing @drmoss_ca ‘s question, but I stopped using Apple Mail on MacOS over a decade ago. I found it far too flaky (over multiple versions on OSes) and couldn’t handle the volume of email I was handling through multiple accounts. I switched to a webmail interface; for the very few times per year that I’d like to be able to do something through a thick clients (eg receiving on email address A and replying from email address B), the grief of flakiness and mysteriously disappearing messages that would then reappear wasn’t worth it.

It’s weird, as Mail on iOS is fine.

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