For the past few years, emails from my 27" iMac would be erased. All that would remain would be the current two weeks. I checked my Mac email settings but I could not find what was causing the emails to be removed. Emails on my iPad, however, were not removed.
Well, I finally found the culprit that was causing their deletion. I do have a PC laptop that runs Windows. The mail program that I use is Thunderbird. On this PC I have two accounts. I opened the preferences on both and checked them out. With one of them, it had a setting to delete messages on the server after 14 days. When I changed this to "Never" the emails on my iMac were not removed.
I don't know how my PC and Thunderbird could affect my Mac but it did.
I don't know how my PC and Thunderbird could affect my Mac but it did.
If you are using IMAP and your mail is stored on the server, the Windows box deleted the messages so that the Mac could no longer retrieve them from there. If the Mac was caching them locally, it likely still followed the server's lead which said those messages were deleted, so it deleted the local cached ones too.
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"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I had a similar duh! moment a while ago. I was travelling with just my iPhone, so decided to check mail on it, deleted old already read emails, came back home and found emails on my iMac deleted! Was tearing my head, and then realised that Gmail (which was earlier set up as POP3) had now been changed to IMAP, and so any deletions on my phone resulted in similar deletions on the iMac.
And now I have a problem - I now have umpteen emails on my phone occupying space that I want to remove, but dare not because I shall lose them on my iMac too.
I no longer seem to be able to set up GMail as POP3 on the iMac. I would love to be able to do that so that my phone can be clean and my iMac retain all emails.
And now I have a problem - I now have umpteen emails on my phone occupying space that I want to remove, but dare not because I shall lose them on my iMac too.
Cheers
It may not be using as much storage as you think. I have 10,000s of email messages on my IMAP accounts but iOS only keeps a small number local. My iPhone is showing 178M and my iPad (different accounts) is 128M vs the near 12G my iCloud account says is mail. I.e. only 1% is on my iPad.
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"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
And now I have a problem - I now have umpteen emails on my phone occupying space that I want to remove, but dare not because I shall lose them on my iMac too.
I no longer seem to be able to set up GMail as POP3 on the iMac. I would love to be able to do that so that my phone can be clean and my iMac retain all emails.
Cheers
What I do is set my Gmail Trash Folder in Mail Preferences to 'Never' delete. Then I can erase on my phone and if I ever need an email, a simple search of the Trash folder makes it available again.
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