After Big Sur update, deleted mail and junk mail disappeared from view

Hey, I was having the same issue and found this thread, hoping for an answer...

Eventually, I figured it out by myself :-)

At the top of the left mailbox list you can see the small title "Favorites".

When you hover over it, there's a + sign that appears:

Click on it and now you can had plenty of "mailboxes" of all kinds.

That's where you can find the "All junk" and "All trash" that you and I were looking for.

hope this helps!.

In addition to being obscure, there's a bug here.

• If the Favourites bar is set to visible (View → Show Favourites Bar) then while the bar is visible the Favourites (+) dropdown is no longer shown and it's not possible to access items such as All Junk and All Drafts.
• If the Favourites bar is set to invisible, then the Favourites (+) dropdown is correctly displayed and accessible.

This may help in finding a few things that may not be readily visible after upgrading to Big Sur (as I found).

I couldn't find my "Junk" folder . . . and found in another post that if you hover your cursor over the upper lefthand of your inboxes' and folders' left column at the small, dimmed "favorites" header, a popup option appears, showing a plus sign (+) in a circle. Click on that and a small popup window appears where you can add other mailboxes (as in my case, the Junk mailbox access).

I've spoken to Apple support about this problem. While you can add a folder called trash or junk to your mailbox, it does not fix the problem. After updating to Big Sur deleted messages in mail will disappear. They will not appear in any other folder, whether it's listed or not. This is a problem with the update and needs to be fixed by Apple. Apple Support, tier 2, could not fix it because it's a software issue. I hope it gets fixed soon.

I cannot thank you enough for your response as it solved my issues. As far as Apple goes, the Mac OS is moving further away from an intuitive, easy to use experience and getting more towards the MS windows disaster. What an absolute pain, wish that I never installed Big Sur.

I think that may be because of the holiday season. I would wait until Post Holiday/Shopping Season to see if it goes back to average. I have noticed more but I feel like its all shopping advertising and phishing scams associated with that.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

I have been onto Apple support for about 3 hours this week trying to find my junk emails and they had me trying all sorts of things. You fixed it in 5 seconds! Why Apple mess with basic things like this I don't know :(

Cheers 👍🏼

Thanks!!

I used to have Inboxes, Drafts, Sent, Junk, Trash, Archive only visible in Favorites within All Inboxes, All Drafts...

Now, I have them in Favorites but also within in each individual account. How do I get rid of them from the individual accounts and only have them in the All X within Favorites?

Thank you!

I installed Big Sur on my 2015 MBP, and also bought a new M1 MBP with Big Sur. My private mail supplier is one.com. When I configured their IMAP mail, by the book, in my brand new M1 thousands of mails just vanished, including the folders they were placed in. "Sent" was empty. I tried making new folders directly on the web, and they became visible in Aplles "Mail". Saved remaining mails into these new folders. But after right clicking and emtying the trash, all of these brand new folders also disappeared from the Mail application, again over a thousand e-mails. And they where deleted in the cloud mail IMAP-server as well. The new Mail application and/or Big Sur is completely useless in the state it is in now.

I lost even more emails, had like 25 folders in my inbox. When emptying the trashcan, all those folders, including the emails, was deleted. And of course they were deleted from the mail server as well. Luckily my gaming-PCs were offline, so I could make a fresh backup and restore everything, via Outlook on Windows. After speaking with Apple Support we tried again. Made a fresh account in the Mac and set the mail up again. Same story. What's remarkable is that Outlook works flawless on the Mac, but not Apples Mail-application.

In my case, a whole bunch of folders with contents were actually deleted. Had to restore them from another computer. Tried again. Same problem, everything was deleted, so I had to restore again. I now only use Outlook Mail, that still works good.

I've clicked on the + under favourite and got the list but all junk is still not there. Anyone else having that issue or can explain how to find all junk?

You will find "+" only in window mode, so exit fullscreen.

I'm always using mail in fullscreen mode and in fullscreen mode "+" sign on favorites tab don't even exist.