Mail: All Sent items getting duplicated.

[BudVitoff]

I'm running Apple Mail under Sierra.

This peculiarity happened to me years ago and it turned out that the Sent Items folder was not only reflecting local items being sent, but also the same items at the server (thanks to IMAP). The solution was simply to uncheck something so that that only one copy was being reflected instead of both.

Unfortunately, I can't remember where to find that checkbox option. Is there someone out there that does not have my old man's memory?

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Go to Mac Mail preferences (CMD+,) and click on the Accounts tab. Now click on the Mailbox Behaviors sub-tab and ensure that for Drafts Mailbox, you use the local Drafts folder (otherwise you'll get a ton of draft duplication), but for Sent Mailbox choose the remote (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, <Your mail provider>) folder..

That should, I believe, avoid this duplication issue. This is how I have it setup on my Mac Mail with my 1 iCloud and 3 Gmail accounts..

 

[BudVitoff]

Ashwin,

I was looking through the list of "My Posts" and found this thread.

It's been happening again on my new iMac. I took a look at your solution and I don't remember using it! I was sure that I had found a checkbox for "leave a copy in your Sent mailbox" or something like that, and unchecking it resolved the problem -- now I can't find that either.

You said "but for Sent Mailbox choose the remote (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, <Your mail provider>) folder.." but my choices there show @Msn and On My Mac at the top level, with Sent under each of them. Now, .msn is just the domain of my email address. Is that what you're calling my mail provider? If so, then do I choose the @Msn/Sent mailbox?

I'm confused, because my server is at Outlook.com and I've always thought of them as my mail provider.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Well basically the duplication happens with the Drafts folder. If you choose to save that on the remote server (a mistake), Mail will create a new copy of your mail with each change you make, so you'll end up getting a ton of duplicates on the server. So for drafts, you should keep them locally on your Mac only and once submitted it gets deleted. The only exception here is you are the kind (bad) person that tends to use drafts as a notes or just start emails that you send much later, in which case this will cause you grief since you have to send/see the drafts from the machine where you started them as opposed to having them be shared across any device that has access to that email account.

So, in my comments above, for the Sent mailbox you would choose MSN (this has taken on multiple names from Hotmail to Outlook now)

 

[BudVitoff]

You said "The only exception here is you are the kind (bad) person that tends". You did mean "if" and not "is", right?
Yes, I generally play by conservative rules. It's not as exciting, but it's safer.

I could probably just wait for the mail to let me know sooner or later, but you're so handy ...

If I understand you correctly, I should associate Drafts and Junk with "On my Mac" and Sent with "Msn" and all should be well. Given that, in Accounts>Mailbox Behaviors>Sent Mailbox should I show "Msn" or should I show the "Sent" that is subordinate to "Msn"? The same question applies to the other two fields, but I'm sure I could handle them if you set me straight on this one.

Now for something completely different: I would like to chat with you about IMAP and POP3 and what gets stored at the server and/or locally, because I want to make sure that my (and my ex's) backup package (CrashPlan) has everything it needs to restore my highly-categorized mail data. Is this something that can be handled in this thread, a different thread, by private messaging, or should I just go away?

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Correct, I meant "if" you are the person that uses drafts in appropriately, since I've seen a few people do that (they think it's faster) and then it becomes their normal mode of operation for notes or temporary things.

The settings you have for Drafts, Junk and Sent sound good.

The big difference between IMAP and POP3 is best if you think of IMAP as a window to your mail. Every device that uses IMAP gets it's own window to the mail, so they are all sharing the mail but have their own window and actions from one device are automatically reflected on other devices since all of your windows are looking at the same group of mail/folders.

POP3 is a totally different beast, think of it as a number of homes that all (strangely) have the same address. So mail is delivered to one home and unless you take extra measures, only that device (home) can see that mail. To work around this "issue", most mail applications when using POP3 give you the option to "leave messages on server" or something worded similarly. This basically means that each device gets a chance to download the mail locally and thus access it. However, if you delete the mail or file it away, those actions only happen on a single device and is not shared amongst all of your devices.

Every decent mail service offers IMAP in addition to POP3 and IMAP is the recommended mode of connection.

 

[MacInWin]

One difference between IMAP and POP is that in implementing IMAP, a lot of providers have now put a time limit on how long messages remain on their server. Since what you see is a window into that server, that means that email COULD just go away after a while. If you want to keep an archive of your highly-categorized emails, you will need to keep that copy on your mac in a folder that is NOT provided by your service. What I have done for those emails is to create, in Mail, folder on my Mac and then I wrote rules to copy the messages from the regular inbox to the local folders so that when my service decides to delete old mail, I still have a copy locally stored and therefore untouched. But I do have to clean up the local copies periodically to get rid of the junk that can accumulate in them.

 

[BudVitoff]

I'm in an interesting situation here. I have always thought that with IMAP, all I had locally was pointers to the actual data at the server, with no data locally, which made synching across different devices easy. This was bothering me, because CrashPlan could not access what seemed to be the only set of data, which was at the server.

A couple of days ago, I was chatting with one of my doctors about computers, as usual, and this same subject came up. He "proved" to me that the actual data was also held locally, by saying that he has disconnected his iMac from the internet and therefore the server, but he could still see his data locally. This doesn't jibe with your description. It also raises the quandary that would arise if he's right about duplicate sets of data, and if you're right about the IMAP data at the server possibly disappearing after a while.

What do you say about this?

 

[Raz0rEdge]

IMAP is not just a view-only method, you do have all the email locally and the folders. What IMAP gives you is the ability to have a change on one device be reflected on all. So from a backup perspective, you can backup the mail data (where it resides) and that is indeed your email history.

 

[MacInWin]

What I was trying to say is that unlike POP, where the message was downloaded to your system and then never touched again by the service, IMAP can, and will, delete messages in the Inbox if they disappear from the server. And providers are beginning to limit how long they store messages on their servers. So to prevent deletion, if you want to keep the messages, you have to copy them out of the Inbox to some other mailbox that is local. In that sense, what you see is a window into the server state. And it works both ways. When you delete from the local inbox, a message is also deleted from the server and from all other linked inboxes as well. That also did not happen under POP.

 

[BudVitoff]

Hooray! I got a twofer!

Between the two of you, it looks as though I'm okay. My primary concern is that I'm able to backup my "highly-categorized" mailboxes. I do treat my Inbox as relatively temporary storage, and I get rid of stuff there -- by deleting or filing -- rather quickly, so I don't see the IMAP time limit as a problem. OTOH, my daughter has an Inbox that goes back five years, and my ex's goes back about 15 years! I particularly like those emails that talk about "the church service next Sunday" ... and the like. I'm going to stick with my IMAP, but I think I'll leave them both in POP.

Thank you, gentlemen. I'm a lot more comfortable now.