How do I stop Mail from removing messages from my Gmail server?

I have checked several of the posts in here already and do not seem to be able to find an answer to my question. In the version of Mail on Tiger, on the Account preferences pane and the advanced tab, there is an option check box to Remove Message after retrieving from server (or something like that) In the version of mail in Snow Leopard, that option is no longer on the Advanced tab and I can't find it anywhere. I deleted my Gmail account and re-added it to see if I missed it somewhere in the process.
Thanks in advance for any help!

Thanks for your reply! That answers my question, but creates another. How do you setup a POP3 account? If I click on the add account button and put in my Gmail credentials, it automatically sets up as IMAP. I am not even given the option to setup as POP3.
Thanks!

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How do i stop Mail from downloading all my old messages without deleting them

Hello there,
    i've just bought a new 13 inch macbook pro, and i'm very happy with it. Being sort of new to apple i still have some problems though.
the main one concerns mail:   How do I prevent my laptop from downloading thousands of old messages i had stored on my gmail account?
let me be clearer: i set mail up and it instantly started downloading tons of old messages that i don't want stored on my mac, since it only has 128gb storage, but i'd still like to be able to look for them in case I needed to. so i don't want to permanently erase them, get rid of them here to save some space.
is that possible? and if yes how?
I also have an other problem with Mail and it's the fact that gmail doesn't let me send pages files...it says it could be a dangerous file so it stops me.
any solutions?
thanks to all of you

Csound1 wrote:
disguise wrote:
Sounds to me like your using iCloud to sync mail - but you don't want mail sync'd.
System Preferences -> iCloud
uncheck Mail
The OP is using Gmail, not iCloud.
How do I prevent my laptop from downloading thousands of old messages i had stored on my gmail account?
Unchecking Mail will do nothing at all.
And as Gmail is an Imap account it will download all mail in the account to the client.
If this is unwanted behaviour use a different email system (a POP system) or remove the mail from the Gmail server.
Gmail can be configured as POP or IMAP

How do I stop mail from downloading ALL my messages?

How do I tell mail not to download ALL my messages but rather only the recent ones that are relevant? I have 4 gmails and a regular imap account. If mail downloads all my messages it's going to waste 30 GB at least.
Thanks.

Csound1 wrote:
disguise wrote:
Sounds to me like your using iCloud to sync mail - but you don't want mail sync'd.
System Preferences -> iCloud
uncheck Mail
The OP is using Gmail, not iCloud.
How do I prevent my laptop from downloading thousands of old messages i had stored on my gmail account?
Unchecking Mail will do nothing at all.
And as Gmail is an Imap account it will download all mail in the account to the client.
If this is unwanted behaviour use a different email system (a POP system) or remove the mail from the Gmail server.
Gmail can be configured as POP or IMAP

How do I stop mail from looping the same emails into inbox?

How do I stop mail from looping the same emails into the inbox over and over again? It does the same thing with deleted messages that keep showing up again and again in multiples even after deleting them. I have made sure my server settings in all email accounts are set to delete immediately once I delete them on my MacBook Pro/IPhone. This issue has severely compromised the efficiency of Mail on my MacBook. Thanks for any help you're able to give me.

I have tried that but it does not fix the problem.
The "card" group is not a previous recipient.
Although not available for editing in Contacts, it is a valid group showing up in the "To" field of Messages, Mail, or any app using the AddressBook.
Its associated file is automatically created in:
~/Library/ApplicationSupport/AddressBook/Sources/<hexaFolder>/MetaData/<hexa>ABG roup.abcdg
This is why it also shows up in the Spotlight results...
If I manually remove this file, it gets recreated...
If I turn off the syncing through iCloud, the entry gets deleted. If I turn it up, it comes back!

How do I stop mail from automatically opening when iCal events begin?

How do I stop mail from automatically opening when iCal events begin?
When an event is about to begin, the mail app opens and I'd like to turn that off since I don't use the mail app.
Thanks!

Hi
This may have something to do with the "Automatically retrieve invitations from Mail" option being enabled? Click on the iCal Menu > Preferences > Advanced. It may also be the Alarms setting? This is for 10.6 iCal so it may be in a different place for 10.5?
Tony

How do I stop mail from automatically updating on my iphone 5?

How do I stop mail from automatically updating on my iphone 5? Thanks

Settings > General > Restrictions, make sure changes to "Accounts" are allowed.

How do I stop mail from loading old mail?

how do I stop MAIL from loading old messages

What type of email account are you using, POP, IMAP if you are using an IMAP account then you would need to go into your mail settings and change the delete mail after a day, week, month, never.

How do I stop mail from opening when I launch safari?

Can someone please let me know if there is a way to stop mail from opening when I launch safari.
Thanks

You are really confused. There are several things I'd recommend, first is becoming more familiar with your computer by visiting (and bookmarking)
Mac 101
Find Out How Video tutorials
Switch 101
Next, you have 90 days of free AppleCare telephone support when you buy any new Mac. You will find the phone number in your manual or you can also click the AppleCare Contact Info if you cannot find it. However I would STRONGLY recommend carefully reading your manual. The AppleCare people will be able to help you sort out what you have done. You can also visit and Apple Store and speak to a Genius for free, just make an appointment.

How can I STOP mail from syncing with .mac????

I don't have a .mac account, I will never have a .mac account, I have in mail prefs BOTH boxes under "synchronize with other computers using .mac" unchecked, and yet Mac Mail tries to tie up my entire system "synchronizing with .mac" all the time, especially when traffic is heavy (downloading or uploading). I've got activity viewer on and the stop sign is ghosted, there appears to be no way to stop Mail from doing this useless tie up time wasting process that manages to completely freeze up mail until it's completed and sometimes slow up other programs as well. I only have POP accounts, no IMAP accounts that have to be synced.
This didn't start happening until I upgraded to 10.4.11. Prior to that Mail blazed through everything, and it NEVER tried to sync with .mac.
Is there any way to turn this useless "feature" (for me) OFF?
Thanks!

I was on Tiger earlier, but just got home to a Leopard machine... and a power outage during the day seems to have blown my Tiger's Monitor, but look for...
/Users/bd/Library/Application Support/SyncServices/Local/clientdata/com.apple.DotMacSync
I'd try dragging the whole folder, if it exists...
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Application Support/SyncServices
to the Desktop & reboot, we can always move it back if need be.
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.DotMacSync.<ethernet MAC address>.plist
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.DotMacSync.plist
are both other good choices to drag to the desktop.
We might even have to go in and Copy this to the Desktop then Trash the originl...
/System/Library/CoreServices/dotmacsyncclient

How do I move mail from an old server to a new server?

I am rebuilding my server. The new server runs on OS X 10.9.4 with Server 3.1.2. The old server ran OS X 10.9.x and Server 3.x (the exact versions are not known).
Within the folder /Library/Server/Mail, I found the email stores for both systems. I have gone through each folder and identified the 36 character string that serves to identify the user's mailbox and paired each one to a user id on both systems. On the old system, there are multiple mailboxes for some users, and I think it is a result of the users being deleted and recreated: perhaps the system identified the identical name and assumed that the user might be different and therefore created a unique 36 character id for the mail system.
The trick is, I am trying to recover the mail from the old server.
I have attempted to copy the files which are human readable and formatted for SMTP transmission to the new server under the correct mailbox corresponding to the owning user (see screen shots below). The simple act of copying the files has not made these files visible via the IMAP protocol. I have tried restarting the mail service hoping that the Server app would rebuild whatever indexes need to be built so that the mail can be served via IMAP, and that has not worked either.
The question is, how do I get the mail from the old server mail boxes into the new server mailboxes?
This screen shot shows the location of one mail collection at /Library/Server/Mail/Data/mail/[userid]. Mail sits in the "new" folder only for a moment before being processed and put into the "cur" folder. Copying mail from the old server into the "new" folder produces an empty "new" folder, but one can see the files populate briefly before they are moved into the "cur" folder.
The next screen shot shows one email opened in TextEdit. The format should look very familiar. This is the same format that one would use to send SMTP requests to an SMTP server. This particular example happens to be an email from a Gmail account to the PediatricHeartCenter.org domain to test the mail system when the old server was set up. It was sent on 24 Jan 2014 and had text reading "Intended for Mavericks1. -Jared".

On further research, I have learned that OS X Server sets Dovecot to use the MailDir format. The email messages can be removed from the folders and put back, and as long as they were present in the folder to begin with (received by Dovecot originally), they reflect in the Mail.app on client computers. Deleting a file in the "cur" folder causes the file to disappear in Mail.app. Copying the file back into the "cur" folder will cause the file to reappear without any modification of an index file or any other system component, as long as the file was properly formatted by Dovecot to be identifiable to that folder.
According to Dovecot.org's review of MailDir found here (http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Ma,ilboxFormat/Maildir), the file name can be broken into simple pieces: " [unixtimestamp].[process id].[hostName],S=<message size>,W=<virtual message size>/2,[status tags]". The original MailDir++ specification requires the string ":2," to appear after the virtual size, but this file naming format is not legal in Mac OS X, so Dovecot is modified by Apple to use "/2," instead.
The Dovecot's wiki describes inserting new messages as follows:
Mail delivery
Qmail's how a message is delivered page suggests to deliver the mail like this:
Create a unique filename (only "time.pid.host" here, later Maildir spec has been updated to allow more uniqueness identifiers)
Do stat(tmp/<filename>). If the stat() found a file, wait 2 seconds and go back to step 1.
Create and write the message to the tmp/<filename>.
link() it into new/ directory. Although not mentioned here, the link() could again fail if the mail existed in new/ dir. In that case you should probably go back to step 1.
All this trouble is rather pointless. Only the first step is what really guarantees that the mails won't get overwritten, the rest just sounds nice. Even though they might catch a problem once in a while, they give no guaranteed protection and will just as easily pass duplicate filenames through and overwrite existing mails.
Step 2 is pointless because there's a race condition between steps 2 and 3. PID/host combination by itself should already guarantee that it never finds such a file. If it does, something's broken and the stat() check won't help since another process might be doing the same thing at the same time, and you end up writing to the same file in tmp/, causing the mail to get corrupted.
In step 4 the link() would fail if an identical file already existed in the maildir, right? Wrong. The file may already have been moved to cur/ directory, and since it may contain any number of flags by then you can't check with a simple stat() anymore if it exists or not.
Step 2 was pointed out to be useful if clock had moved backwards. However again this doesn't give any actual safety guarantees, because an identical base filename could already exist in cur/. Besides if the system was just rebooted, the file in tmp/ could probably be even overwritten safely (assuming it wasn't already link()ed to new/).
So really, all that's important in not getting mails overwritten in your maildir is the step 1: Always create filenames that are guaranteed to be unique. Forget about the 2 second waits and such that the Qmail's man page talks about.
The process described by the QMail man page referenced above suggests that as long as a file is placed in the "new" folder, that a mail reader can access it. The mail reader then moves the file to the "cur" folder and "cleans up" the "new" folder. This is clearly happening in OS X, because the messages are moving from "new" to "cur", but IMAP is still not serving these foreign messages to the remote readers.
The thought crossed my mind that perhaps it is the fact that the host name does not match, which would cause the failure, however changing the "host" portion of the name from the old-server to the new-server did not fix the issue. Even with the new server name in the file name, the inserted message fails to appear in client Mail applications.
Within the file their is header information that still references the old machine. I'd like to not have to change the email files, because this will violate the integrity of the message. Also, this might take a lot of time or incur risks associated with poor automated processing. The header information should not be referenced by Dovecot, because the wiki page describing MailDir notes that neither Dovecot nor Dovecot's implementation of IMAP refers to the messages header information when moving and serving these mail files.
Unlike when using mbox as mailbox format, where mail headers (for example Status, X-UID, etc.) are used to determine and store meta-data, the mail headers within maildir files are (usually) notused for this purpose by dovecot; neither when mails are created/moved/etc. via IMAP nor when maildirs are placed (e.g. copied or moved in the filesystem) in a mail location (and then "imported" by dovecot). Therefore, it is (usually) not necessary, to strip any such mail headers at the MTA, MDA or LDA (as it is recommended with mbox).
This paragraph leads me to believe that after the mail box is identified that the content of the file becomes irrelevant to the system which manages. This suggests that we should be able to inject messages into a mailbox and have the system serve them as though they had belonged in that mailbox all along. Yet I have not found a way to do this.

HT1277 how to delete e mail from my yahoo server once i down loaded to my apple mail

how to delete e mail from yahoo server once i down loaded to my apple mail

Hi wh2,
Welcome to Apple Support Communities.
If your Yahoo account is set up as a POP account, you can set the option "Remove copy from server after retrieving a message" in the Advanced settings of Mail.
See this article for the steps to locate this option:
Using a POP account with multiple devices
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3228
In Mail for Mac OS X 10.5 or later, choose Mail > Preferences.
Click the Accounts tab.
Select the account for which you wish to change the settings.
Click the Advanced tab.
Select the "Remove copy from server after retrieving a message" option.
Also, this article has more information on the options found in the Advanced tab:
Mail (Mountain Lion): Advanced accounts preferences
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11686
Remove copy from server after retrieving a message
Specify when you want to delete received messages from the mail server. You can deselect this option if you need to temporarily access messages from more than one location or computer.
This option is available only for Post Office Protocol (POP) accounts.
Best,
Jeremy

How can I stop Mail from replicating a message & trying to send?

A few days ago I tried to send out an email with three attachments which totaled over 53 megs. Of course it was too large for the server and I recieved bounce back that the message could not be sent. I then created two seperate messages with the attachments at appropriate sizes. I have multiple email accounts and didn't tink anything of the event other than "I should have checked before sending..."
The next day I started getting the system warnings that there was no available space on my hard drive. The previous day I had over 5 gigs of available space.
After researching a few options I noticed the Mail application was having trouble sending an recieveing from one of the four accounts. Then I spotted the culprit - the account was trying to send out the mail with the 53 meg attachment. It was replicating and storing the message and attachment in the "On My Mac" saved mail folders as "Recovered Mail". It had replicated 100 times - 5 gigs worth. The message was not in my Outbox or Sent mail folders.
When accessing the newly created "Recovered Mail" folder and trying to delete the specific messages the application would crash. The work around was to delete the folder. Howver, the next day the folder re-appered and began populating the hard drive with duplicate files.
- Have tried virus scan (Norton AntiVirus) and using Norton Firewall to lock down all drive to internet traffic (annoying with block / allow mesages).
- Have tried deleting the account and re-creating it.
After a few hours or a day the dreaded "Recovered Mail" file was back and hogging drive space.
The account is accessible from my iPhone and through web browsers with no issues. I can't even find the offending message and attachment. So I suspect there is a bug / corruption in Mail.
HELP!
need to know how to fix it or if I have a new virus.
Thanks!

Is this an IMAP account?
If so, delete the messages in Mail from all folders and quit Mail.
Go the the website and clear the messages from all folders there.
Reopen Mail and verify the messages have been deleted for all folders.

How do i stop mail from synchronising and downloading old messages on the google mail server

its downloading over 300 000 messages up until 2004! and whenever i go online from mail on the mac it starts the process all over again. are there settings anywhere from where i can stop this

Try rebuilding the mailbox. This can take awhile if you have a lot of mail.
Rebuild mailbox
If that doesn't work, try re-indexing the mailboxes. This can take awhile if you have a lot of mail.
Reindex messages Mavericks/Yosemite

How can I stop Mail from opening

Whenever I use ANY web browser (Safari or Firefox) and click on an e-mail (mailto) link, Apple Mail opens. It is driving me crazy. I am about to throw my computer away and go back to using good old paper and a pencil to do everything.
I have tried the following:
Firefox:
Preferences/Applications/mailto and changed the drop-down to gmail (that is the browser my wife uses and the mail she uses)
THIS WORKED FOR FIREFOX
Safari:
The preferences panel has nothing about how to handle mail requests.
So I went into Mail (which I frikkin hate by the way, worse than anything you could ever imagine)
Mail's preferences don't have an option for ANYTHING to handle mail... besides Mail (which is a horrible program).
When I click select and choose Firefox, Safari, anything, it reverts back to mail.
I want mail to STOP opening when I click an e-mail address. I am fine with the solution for Firefox. How do I configure Safari to do the same?
THANKS!!!!!

Hi Dave! This may help if you should want to save your emails to your computer which AM can do.
--Open Mail
--From Application Toolbar choose MAIL
--Choose ACCOUNTS from Mail tool bar
--Choose "Account Information"
--In the bottom right hand box -- Choose the "drop down box" (blue arrows) and Choose the mail box you want to send mail from
--Check "Use only this server". (Safari has a drop down on their tool bar that allows you to choose which box you want to send from.)
Go to Safari or a Web Page and send an email message. See if this works.
Of course, I'm assuming you have filled in the Account information for all your mailboxes. If not, that's a whole different procedure but well worth the effort, all your mailboxes are at your fingertips and you can save all your mail to your computer, back it up and never loose a word. :-)
Another caveat: I am using OS X 10.6.8 and the later versions of OS X may have dropped or modified Mail. Perhaps someone using one of the newer versions can add their knowledge here.
AM has many useful perks, it just takes time to find them but they really are worth the effort.
….goldie

How can I stop mail from opening single page attachments.

I open some mail attachments in Notetaker app to make adjustments to some pages before sending on but when an attachment is only a single page it opens in the email message itself and then I can't open it. How can I stop this happening?
Hopefully thanks in advance
John

Hi Dave! This may help if you should want to save your emails to your computer which AM can do.
--Open Mail
--From Application Toolbar choose MAIL
--Choose ACCOUNTS from Mail tool bar
--Choose "Account Information"
--In the bottom right hand box -- Choose the "drop down box" (blue arrows) and Choose the mail box you want to send mail from
--Check "Use only this server". (Safari has a drop down on their tool bar that allows you to choose which box you want to send from.)
Go to Safari or a Web Page and send an email message. See if this works.
Of course, I'm assuming you have filled in the Account information for all your mailboxes. If not, that's a whole different procedure but well worth the effort, all your mailboxes are at your fingertips and you can save all your mail to your computer, back it up and never loose a word. :-)
Another caveat: I am using OS X 10.6.8 and the later versions of OS X may have dropped or modified Mail. Perhaps someone using one of the newer versions can add their knowledge here.
AM has many useful perks, it just takes time to find them but they really are worth the effort.
….goldie

How do I stop Mail from removing messages from my Gmail server?

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