Read mail dissapears!

Question

My girlfriend just got a new macbook. I set her AOL account up in Mail. it sends and receives great, but it deletes her read mail (the stuff she reads but still needs)!! And to make it worse, it pulls it off the aol server, so going to aol.com doesn't help either. She's already lost some important emails from ppl she can't contact any other way... anyone have any ideas? thanks

Answer 1

R C-R,
With all due respect, your first reply did not say
this was an AOL issue & its rhetorical question would
not be helpful unless someone already knew the answer.
But the question was not rhetorical. This could be either an AOL or a Mail issue. I clearly stated that Mail had no bearing on this, so it could only be an AOL issue. If you can manage to interpret what I said as meaning something else, I'd like to know.
Likewise, "do not use AOL" is not an answer,
That depends on what the problem is. If the problem is that you don't want read messages to be deleted from AOL's server, then it certainly is an answer. Actually, it's the only possible answer, as there is nothing you can do to prevent AOL from purging messages from the server.
Now, if the problem is that you don't mind AOL to delete your messages from the server, as long as you can do something to keep them somewhere else, then that's a different problem -- and I did answer that as well.
In other words, what you say is not an answer is only part of what I said, and the problem you say it's not an answer for is only one of the possible interpretations of the problem. I considered all the possible interpretations and addressed all of them.
anymore than 'don't use whatever' would be for anyone else
seeking info on how to use 'whatever' with some Apple app.
Sorry, but this is wrong. If what you want to do with a particular application cannot be done, then "don't use this application to do that" is certainly the answer.
Basically, this does have a lot to do with Mail;
Wrong. This is an AOL thing. It has absolutely nothing to do with Mail.
specifically, that it isn't aware of how AOL's mail service works
Nor should it. Mail is a POP & IMAP mail client, not an AOL client. Expecting it to know anything AOL-specific is barking up the wrong tree. I can't believe I'm having to tell you this again.
users do have to set it up to compensate for that
if they wish to use Mail & AOL email together.
Or course they do. And the same would happen if they used any other standard IMAP client. That's precisely the problem (the AOL problem, not the Mail problem), that AOL doesn't behave as a normal IMAP server would. You cannot blame IMAP clients for not being aware of AOL idiosyncrasies.
Since that is possible, at least to a fair degree of
compatibility, it is puzzling that you end your post with:
There are no settings you can "adjust" in Mail to
"correct the problem".
Tell me which settings can be "adjusted" in Mail to prevent AOL from purging messages from the server.
I know you generally know what you are talking about,
but sometimes I wonder if you realize that what you
post isn't adequate for others to know what you are
talking about too!
The thing is, what I say and the way I say it depends enormously on the attitude of whoever I'm replying to. If, for example, the OP assumes this is a Mail problem, without making any effort to investigate whether that's really the case, nor to understand what's really going on, and he/she is wrong, then I won't answer in the same way that I would if he/she asked what the problem could be without blaming the innocent.
The OP in this thread didn't ask why mail was being deleted from the server. Rather, he blamed Mail right away for something that was AOL's fault, without really knowing what he was talking about. Hence, I answered accordingly, i.e. I just said it was an AOL issue without providing any additional information that could help him understand why that was the case. Had he just asked why messages were being deleted from the server, I would have replied in an entirely different way...