> As best I understand it, there is no way to change how long Junk keeps mail. It deletes it at 30 days. Though, of course, you can delete it sooner.
I understand that is the DEFAULT setting.
However, on my Mac, I specifically set all my accounts to “Never” delete junk messages, because I do not go through it very frequently. Like, maybe once per year or less. And I have never experienced the server pushing auto-deletions to my computer before. That is absolutely criminal, the deletion of someone’s personal e-mail without consent by the server!!!
I set it to “Never” because the spam filters are way too over-aggressive these days. I often experience false classification of business invoices, store receipts, bills, and some listserv messages as spam, despite there being no ostensible reason why it should be considered spam. For example, I am subscribed to a list called “[NucNews]” and I set a rule to always move the messages to a custom folder if their title contains that phrase. However, sometimes these messages STILL get sent to Junk despite the rule. It’s as though the spam filter supercedes all custom rules in some cases.
Given that spam filters often make mistakes, I find it totally unacceptable for any company to enforce deletion of spam after such a short period of time. In effect, to me, this is worse than the theft of personal data, since now I am deprived of crucial documents with apparently no recourse.
Worst of all, this never used to happen to me. The servers used to respect my settings. I know, because on my Mac Pro, which I keep mostly disconnected from the net, has years worth of Junk on it.
This is the worst data loss that has ever happened to me that I can remember in my adult life. There is no versioned backup of the server data or iOS cloud backup that I can restore from, and even if I restore my email folder from a time machine backup, as soon as I go online, the server will force-delete all that mail again off my laptop. I don’t even know what would happen if I restored from a backup, then moved these messages out of Junk on the Mac, then synced with the server (where they were deleted from junk). If the server pushes deletions by message ID, they’d still get deleted. Also I don’t want the client & server out of sync.
So angry right now!
