Mail automatically removes old messages from IMAP

We are using one IMAP account (not iCloud or Gmail) for business mails.
While the Microsoft office at the office (necessary as several essential programs are only available for Windows) displays all messages, older mails will no longer be displayed in mail on the Apple IMAC. This is valid for both my iMac and my Macbook air (Mail 7.3 but true for older versions as well).
This is very annoying, as we sometimes need data from these messages and are unable to obtain those data without driving to the office.
Are there any hidden tools to display all mails.
In addition the search function often does not find mails, although they are there when you look for them manually (i.e. by scanning through all the mails). This feature of mail convinced my wife to stay with windows whenever possible.
Thanks in advance for your help

I see similar results if I go anywhere near the 'Get Mail' button - I may receive hundreds of old, read, and/or deleted emails. I've learned to never use 'Get Mail'= - if I don't use that, all seems to be relatively well.

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Mail is moving old messages from folders into the inbox

Hey,
Mail has started behaving really weird. It has started to move old messages, from various folders into the inbox. When i try to move it back, i have to use the contextual menu to do that, drag and drop doesn't work.
Has anyone experienced this before? Help is greatly appriciated!
/Andreas

Hi Andreas.
Verify/repair the startup disk (not just permissions), as described here:
The Repair functions of Disk Utility: what's it all about?
After having fixed all the filesystem issues, if any, and ensuring that there’s enough space available on the startup disk (a few GB, plus the space needed to make a backup copy of the Mail folder), proceed as follows to re-create Mail’s index:
1. Quit Mail if it’s running.
2. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Mail/. Make a backup copy of this folder, just in case something goes wrong, e.g. by dragging it to the Desktop while holding the Option (Alt) key down. This is where all your mail is locally stored.
3. Locate Envelope Index and move it to the Trash. If you see any other “Envelope Index”-named file there, delete it as well.
4. Move any “IMAP-”, “Mac-”, or “Exchange-” account folders to the Trash. Note that you can do this with IMAP-type accounts because they store mail on the server and Mail can easily re-create them. DON’T trash any “POP-” account folders, as that would cause all the mail stored there to be lost.
5. Open Mail. It will tell you that your mail needs to be “imported”. Click Continue and Mail will proceed to re-create Envelope Index — Mail says it’s “importing”, but it just re-creates the index if the mailboxes are already in Mail 2.x format.
6. As a side effect of having removed the IMAP account folders, those accounts may be in an “offline” state now. Do Mailbox > Go Online to bring them back online.
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder. That is, ~/Library is the Library folder within the user’s home folder, i.e. /Users/username/Library.

Mail automatically moves old messages into a new folder.

Hi,
I noticed today that Mail automatically created a new folder called Aug2009 and moved all my old messages from my Inbox into that folder. How do I stop it from doing that? I would like to be able to see and search through ALL my mail at once, not just one month at a time.
Thanks for your help
-Patrick

Greetings,
Sounds like you have a Rule setup to do that, since it's not something Mail would do all by itself. Look in Preferences > Rules for that and if you see it, delete it; then move the messages back to your Inbox.

Re: Removing Old messages from the queue.

Hi:
I am using BEA Tuxedo 6.5. We are having problem that our queue is getting 3 messages
and it chokes our application. Is there any way to clean up the old messages.
I did see a post in which Scott said set the timeout on Message. Where in message?
I looked into TPQCTL structure and it takes time to deque but I could not able
to find place to set Message expiration time. My message buffer type is STRING.
Thanks a lot in advance for your help.

/Q was enhanced in release 7.1. You can dequeue messages by A) writing a
program to dequeue them and throw them away; B) using qmadmin
(qdeletemsg).
Deepak wrote:
>
Hi:
I am using BEA Tuxedo 6.5. We are having problem that our queue is getting 3 messages
and it chokes our application. Is there any way to clean up the old messages.
I did see a post in which Scott said set the timeout on Message. Where in message?
I looked into TPQCTL structure and it takes time to deque but I could not able
to find place to set Message expiration time. My message buffer type is STRING.
Thanks a lot in advance for your help.

Mail suddenly retrieves old emails from IMAP

Hello,
Dunno why but sometimes Mail starts to retrieve IMAP msgs that are 1-2 years old... how can I fix this?
Thanks in advance!

I see similar results if I go anywhere near the 'Get Mail' button - I may receive hundreds of old, read, and/or deleted emails. I've learned to never use 'Get Mail'= - if I don't use that, all seems to be relatively well.

How do i remove old messages from my iphone 5s to free up space?

delete old messages

go to settings, messages, then message history and press keep messages then select either 30 days, 1 year or forever. I found the answer myself so it might help someone else

New message in Mail; old message from a year ago being opened

Okay, so here's a weird one. It is the second time it has happened in a week.
I go to open a new message, however when I open it an old message from a year ago opens up in its place. It isn't even a year to date issue. For instance today (October 15) I opened a message dated today, and it pulled up an old message from a completely different sender dated May 16, 2006. It is not doing it with all of my new messages that came in today just the most recent one or two.
Any ideas/help?
tx!

What type of mail account is this (POP, IMAP, .Mac)? If IMAP or .Mac, try rebuilding the mailbox, i.e. select the mailbox in Mail and do Mailbox > Rebuild.

Mail is downloading 9000 old messages from March

Restarting and opening Mail this morning, strangely, Mail is downloading about 9000 (yes, nine thousand) old messages from last March. WHY?
I tried clicking on the X to cancel it, thinking it might just be a glitch, but then it started back up again.
Can you explain what's going on?
Thanks!

I have three accounts. I didn't know the answer to your first question, but looking in my Accounts under Preferences I see IMAP under the Gmail account and POP under the two comcast accounts.
It's too late to see whether it will still do it. They all finished downloading within a half hour or so of posting my question this morning.
Now Mail is working normally, I've just been going through and re-deleting thousands of old emails. Quite annoying.
Thanks for replying. I'd love to hear if you have any idea why this happened.

Possible solution for Mail not downloading messages from IMAP

People have, including me, experienced a rather strange behavior of Mail.app.
On our iMac, Mail would stop retrieving messages from an IMAP account after a while, even though it's set to check every minute and "synchronize automatically" is enabled. Hitting the "get mail" button, doesn't make a difference. I know there were new messages, since they showed up on my own PB, which is connected to the same IMAP account. Once Mail is restarted on the iMac, a dozen new messages are coming in and everything's working fine for the next few hours. Reinstalling the account on the iMac didn't have any effect.
So my theory is:
I've set the iMac energy settings to "allow the hard drive to sleep when possible". I guess Mail isn't capable of spinning it up again and freezes to a certain degree, requiring a restart in order check for new emails.
I'm just testing this with the energy options disabled.

Hey - I'm having somewhat similar problems. The settings are all correct, but most of the time the mail simply fails to download: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1762675&tstart=0

Mail is sending old messages automatically.

Mail is sending old messages automatically. It's been doing this for about six months.
It only happens when open mail.
How can i stop this. I'm running tiger and have performed all the available software updates.
Thanks

First I'd backup your whole Mail folder.
Try trashing this file first, then logout/in...
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
If that doesn't work try the .plists in...
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail/

Importing mailboxes & old messages from yahoo mail

Hi.
I have just figured out how to get mail to send/receive messages from my .yahoo mail account.
Now I have the problem that i have hundreds of messages sat in my yahoo account that i want to import into mail, but i really can't find a way to do it, other than sending them one by one..
Could you tell me if it's possible, and how i go about it?
Many thanks
David Tobin

Hi David.
Not sure what you mean. If Mail is downloading mail received on that account, it should have downloaded all the messages there, not just the new ones -- unless it’s organized in folders on the server, that is. POP mail clients can only see the messages that are in Inbox. Could that be the problem?

Mail keeps retrieving old messages

I was wondering if there is a way to set up mail where it stops getting old messages. I am trying to clear up my mailbox but every time I do it retrieves old messages from the server and then I have to clear those out. In addition, the old messages that are added come up as unread so my unread message number indicator on the icon is always high. I want to be able to have a lot of messages in my inbox but I just wish it would stop getting old messages unless i tell it to. Does anyone else have troubles with this?

Just a curiosity...
POP3 and imap have implemented a 'last' feature. This is a value that represents the last message that the client (iPad mail) has seen from that server.
Sometimes the versions are funky and this 'last' is not implemented or not compatible.
Since this is an old feature (5 years as I remember) most sendmail servers support it. But, well versions and opinions being as they are some people don't use industry standard products and muck up features.
THis isnt all that helpful in solving the issue. But may be useful in diagnosing it.

How do i remove recovered messages from my email

I need help removing recovered messages from my email.

I posted a very similar question. The answers I received here did not help. For anyone else looking, here is the solution that finally worked. My son found it via a Goolge search:
Best answer - Sarah (Google Employee) Go to this answer
chessop
Please follow below steps.
1.Take your gmail account offline from Mail and delete the recovered messages folder.
2. Download the widget to show the hidden files fromhttp://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/developer/hiddenfiles.html
3. Go to UserName/Library/Mail/IMAP-<username>@[email protected]/.OfflineCache
4. Delete all the data under .OfflineCache folder - DO NOT DELETE the folder.
5. Close Mail application and reopen.
This should do the job.
Best regards,
Aadi
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Mail is not downloading messages from two accounts but the messages are in the server.

Hello, I'm having this problem. Mail is not downloading messages from two accounts. I don't know why but there're two accounts working so bad. If I click with the right button on the account and click to see the account details, I can see the messages on the server but not in inbox. I made a sync with this account and my iphone and then the iphone downlad the messages with out problems. Not my imac at work or my imac at home... what can be wrong?
Thanks.

For Gmail, this is normal, there is nothing you can do about it -- just type Mail AND Gmail in the search box to see threads discussing how Gmail works.
As for the other accounts, this shouldn't happen. I wonder if what you're seeing is just that Mail is ignoring this setting for mail that was already on the server when you started using it. I've seen something like this happen when playing with that setting, e.g. changing it from "After one day" to "After one week". Mail would just ignore messages that fell in the timeframe where the two settings could interfere and I didn't notice it until some time later, when Mail "forgot" those messages had already been downloaded and, being faced with them again, dutifully downloaded them as if they were all new.
I believe that, if you leave the setting however you wish and stop playing with it, then Mail shall correctly process any mail that arrives from now on. In order to manually delete old messages that Mail seems to be ignoring, you can invoke the Account Info window (this is probably what you meant when you said "I can delete messages individually"; if that's not the case and want more info on this, just ask).

Can't remove old episodes from iPod sine Update!

I have a Shuffle & usually carry 3-5 episodes each of 8-10 different podcasts. Sine installing the new iTunes for Windows, I can't remove old eps from the device, & it's a total crapshoot as to which NEW episodes the system will allow me to click on!!
HELP!!!!!!

There are several ways to add podcast episodes to the shuffle, so please correct my assumptions in a reply. How you add podcasts determines how you remove them. I can't tell how you do it from the info you provide.
It sound like you may add podcast episodes manually (drag and drop to iPod). If you do, and your shuffle is 3rd or 4th (current) gen, you should consider doing it using automatic syncing, by putting podcast episodes on a playlist (in your iTunes library and syncing it to the shuffle). Update the playlist at any time, by adding new podcast episodes and removing old ones (the shuffle does not need to be connected). Put the podcast episodes in desired order. iTunes automatically updates the shuffle the next time it is connected (or by clicking Sync if already connected). On the shuffle, you can listen to podcasts from that playlist, and hear episodes from different podcasts consecutively, in the desired order.
When you remove podcast episodes manually, is this the way you do it? Again, this is for 3rd or 4th gen shuffle. Select the shuffle in iTunes, so that you see its "management" screen. In the sidebar, under On My Device, click Podcasts. To the right, the podcast episodes currently on the shuffle are shown. Select the one(s) you want to remove an press Delete on the keyboard.

Mail automatically removes old messages from IMAP

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