Difficulties Deleting Emails in Mail

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Level 1

8 points

Difficulties Deleting Emails in Mail

I am trying to delete some emails from Mail on my macbook Pro 2014 running Big Sur 11.7.6 but am having the following issue:

I'm in the deleted items folder and highlight some emails to permantly delete and get the message "are you sure that you want to delete xxxxx number of messages?" In the attachment it can be seen that I have only highlighted one email for deletion but asked if I want to delete 2,464 messages - am I doing something wrong

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.7

Posted on May 16, 2023 4:03 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Tykebike Author

Level 1

8 points

May 16, 2023 6:45 AM in response to dialabrain

Thanks but no, I have an IMAP account.

I have just tried changing my mailbox preferences as detailed here Change Mailbox Behaviours preferences in Mail on Mac – Apple Support (UK)

and changed the erase time period on the bin from never to whenever I close mail and that seemed to stop the behaviour. I have now changed it to 1 week which seems more reasonable so I'll see how it goes.

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Answer 2

dialabrain

Level 10

135,935 points

May 16, 2023 4:48 AM in response to Tykebike

FWIW, if you right or control click on one of the emails you can choose to delete just one from the popup menu. Or, if you select a number of them, you should be able to right or control click on one in the selection and do the same.

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Answer 3

Tykebike Author

Level 1

8 points

May 16, 2023 6:17 AM in response to dialabrain

Thanks for replying so quickly. Unfortuantely at the moment I can't try this as when I am in the Bin folder it won't let me as I can see that it is trying to download 124,300 messages and rising - what is going on I don't know?

I can delete messages from my inbox and they get moved to the bin.

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Answer 4

dialabrain

Level 10

135,935 points

May 16, 2023 6:25 AM in response to Tykebike

It sounds like you have a POP account and your deleted files were never removed from your email server. I don't use POP accounts so I can't really help. Hopefully someone else will reply.

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Answer 5

dialabrain

Level 10

135,935 points

May 16, 2023 6:53 AM in response to Tykebike

Oh. :) I manually empty the Trash every day so it never occurred to me to look there. Mine was set to empty once a month. Not that I would have ever noticed. 😎

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Difficulties Deleting Emails in Mail

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