IMAP account not deleting email from inbox when email moved to trash

The exact same problem occurs with MobileMe, so it is interesting to see that the problem appears to actually be an iPhone problem as opposed to a MobileMe problem.

If you delete any single one of the "trash" messages in your Exchange inbox, do the rest then disappear, too? If so, your experience exactly mirrors mine on MobileMe. I hope Apple fixes this!

ooshnoo,

Actually IMAP when you move something to the trash marks it as "Pending Deletion" on the server.

If it is showing up in other clients, it will usually show up either dimmed or greyed out (opposite of bold ).

Outlook has an option to hide deleted items, and an option to Expunge items that have already been deleted.

Hope this helps,

Nathan C.

ooshnoo,

The email client. Expunge is what it was called in Outlook 98 (the version I used at a previous employer). However, many other email clients call it "Erase Deleted messages".

Email clients with support for IMAP often have an option to hide deleted messages.

IMAP was designed this way so that if something was accidentally deleted, you could recover it until you had erased the messages you had marked to delete.

Hope this helps,

Nathan C.

So there's no way to get the iPhone to send the expunge command, as I'm seeing this issue too.

ooshnoo,

Most IMAP clients have an option to hide them. I know from personal experience the following do for sure:

Outlook
Outlook Express
Entourage
Mail for Mac OS X
Thunderbird

It has been over 10 years since I used Pine regularly, so I am not positive if it does or not.

Hope this helps,

Nathan C.

So again... there's no way to get the iPhone to send the expunge command, as I'm seeing this issue too???

Templeton Peck,

It does so based on the setting under Settings -> Mail Account -> Advanced -> Deleted Messages -> Remove.

Thank you,

Nathan C.

Nathan C wrote:

It does so based on the setting under Settings -> Mail Account -> Advanced -> Deleted Messages -> Remove.

Doesn't that apply to messages in the Deleted Items/Trash folder, and not the Inbox?

Can I point out that this issue applied more generally to all MOVE actions?

Move any message from any source folder to any target folder on your iPhone and what you see on the IMAP server ( I use MobileMe ) is a COPY. The original remains.

So, I read an email from my Inbox on my iPhone ( MobileMe correctly marks it as read ), move it to a folder called 'Action' ( MobileMe has two identicle messages, one in Inbox, another in Action ), then delete the message from iPhone's Action folder ( MobileMe now has three: Inbox, Action, Trash ).

Empty the trash on MobileMe -> trash copy is removed, Inbox and Action copies remain.
Totally impossible to know, in the MobileMe account what the heck I have done and have yet to do 😟

I have two workarounds for this. Since they are workarounds, they are of course not very good.

My understanding ( as a user ) is firstly that trashing is just a folder move to a folder called Trash.
Therefore, the problem as posted above also applies to moving a message between folders on the iPhone - the original message appears to linger in MobileMe.

Secondly, that an IMAP trashing consists of three steps: (a) COPY the message to Trash folder, (b) mark the original message for deletion, (c) 'expunge' the messages marked for deletion. Step (b) is a problem in MobileMe, since messages marked for deletion are not highlighted to the user in any way, so they look like they have not been processed. So, the trick is to convince MobileMe to do an EXPUNGE.

WORKAROUND 1
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This works for me directly in MobileMe: Move any message from the Inbox to another folder - causes MobileMe to expunge all messages-marked-for-deletion from the Inbox.

Say you have trashed ten messages from your iPhone Inbox. When you go to MobileMe, you will see the ten messages in the Trash folder (but you might not remember which ten). These are the MOVED messages. You also see the original ten messages still in the Inbox folder. These messages have indeed been marked for deletion (I can see that from from my sync'd Outlook2007), but MobileMe just isn't showing you that. If you move any message from the Inbox ( say, manually move one of your trashed messages to Trash ) all ten messages will disappear!

WORKAROUND 2
------------

If you have Outlook2007, you can force MobileMe to purge. In Outlook2007, select your me.com account, and then the inbox. You may see your marked-for-deletion-messages with a strikethrough and greyed out. Select Edit > Purge > Purge marked items in [email]xxxx@me.com[/email].

Alternatively, in Outlook2007, you can automate the purging slightly. Navigate to: Tools > Account Settings > (select your me.com account) > Change > More Settings > General. Check the checkbox 'Purge items when switching folders online'. Once you have done this, all you have to do is visit your Inbox from Outlook2007, then leave the folder or close Outlook and the purge will happen automatically.

I hope this helps some people. It certainly helps me, because I use my iPhone to classify my emails for actions as they come in. So now, by using these workarounds, MobileMe can catch up on what I have done.

Luck to all,
P.

Nathan C,

Traditionally, you are correct for IMAP accounts. Deleting means marking a message as deleted, and then purging the deleted message (or the account of deleted messages) should remove the message entirely. However, if you have specified that a particular IMAP folder should serve as a Deleted Mailbox (or Deleted Items or Trash) folder, then your IMAP client should change behavior and turn UI deletions into IMAP move commands to move the message to the IMAP Deleted Mailbox folder, and then turn the typical trash removal schedule into a mark-all-items in the Deleted Mailbox as deleted + purge said IMAP folder. That way, you don't get a proliferation of e-mail in your mail store.

The current (apparent) behavior of leaving a marked-as-deleted item in the original folder, and copying the item into the Deleted Mailbox is causing confusion and mail store bloat. For instance, my mother-in-law sent me a 10 MB e-mail, which was using most of what quota I had left on the server. Deleting the message from my iPhone did not actually help me, because despite the fact that the copy sent to the trash got emptied (I manually emptied it), the original (hidden on the iPhone because it was marked as deleted) was still around waiting for some ne'er to be received purge command.

This seems to be a limitation in the Mail software.