My old email reappeared in my Inbox!

Question

Why did many of the email messages which I thought I had trashed for good suddenly reappear in my Inbox?
So HOW DO you permanently delete messages? The last thing I'm currently doing is selecting all files in my email trash can and hitting delete. Is there more to do??

Answer 1

OK. So the old messages are now no longer on the server... But we don’t know whether they were there when you experienced the problem... Maybe they were there, something has caused Mail to download them again, and things are working properly now...
So what’s the current situation? Do deleted messages keep reappearing? Does it happen with all the messages you delete or with only some of them?
If there are only a few particular messages that refuse to be deleted by normal means, you may be able to get rid of them with Edit > Cut (⌘X) (for best results do it with one message or just a few at a time).
If it’s a more general problem, it could be that there is something wrong with the index, which you may re-create as follows:
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. 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.
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.