Apple Mail is duplicating emails in my inbox to several hundred thousand emails on mac or icloud. My inbox probably has a couple of thousand iCloud emails but I noticed that there are over 200k messages. I am trying to delete them but slow going. I have noticed this in the past once. Obviously something corrupted so is there a fix?
thanks
Mac Studio (2023)
I don't see replies so maybe this problem has a 'N of 1' but here is how I corrected with a comment first:
Comment: I'm using Mail on multiple Macs and something must have become corrupted because old random iCloud emails became duplicated many times over - to the point that a single email could be several GB. This only happened with iCloud and not my other email accounts
To correct: I had to log out of iCloud on all macs and not save anything to my computer from iCloud when quitting. If I only did one computer and deleted from iCloud Mail, then amplified emails migrated back on from other macs.
I then logged into iCloud Mail using Safari browser. I then deleted amplified emails which were easy to find since frequently the emails had a faint number to right indicating number of copies. This was time-consuming since it took a while to move deleted emails to trash, and then took more time to empty trash. So all the offending emails couldn't be deleted at one time considering there was over 20GB of them with well over a hundred thousand copies.
When iCloud Mail looked OK, I then logged back into mac Apple Mail on one mac at a time. It took some time for all the iCloud emails, addresses, calendar, etc to load back on
Mac Mail works normally now and faster.
The duplicated emails were probably less than a dozen unique emails and most were simple newsletters, advertisements, airline-reservations, and like that had been received last year.
I don't see replies so maybe this problem has a 'N of 1' but here is how I corrected with a comment first:
Comment: I'm using Mail on multiple Macs and something must have become corrupted because old random iCloud emails became duplicated many times over - to the point that a single email could be several GB. This only happened with iCloud and not my other email accounts
To correct: I had to log out of iCloud on all macs and not save anything to my computer from iCloud when quitting. If I only did one computer and deleted from iCloud Mail, then amplified emails migrated back on from other macs.
I then logged into iCloud Mail using Safari browser. I then deleted amplified emails which were easy to find since frequently the emails had a faint number to right indicating number of copies. This was time-consuming since it took a while to move deleted emails to trash, and then took more time to empty trash. So all the offending emails couldn't be deleted at one time considering there was over 20GB of them with well over a hundred thousand copies.
When iCloud Mail looked OK, I then logged back into mac Apple Mail on one mac at a time. It took some time for all the iCloud emails, addresses, calendar, etc to load back on
Mac Mail works normally now and faster.
The duplicated emails were probably less than a dozen unique emails and most were simple newsletters, advertisements, airline-reservations, and like that had been received last year.
Welcome and thank you for reaching out. 😉
Simply delete the Outlook account from Mail.
Close the Mail app, then open it back up after a reasonable amount of time has passed to clear the RAM memory.
Now simply add your Outlook account back and wait while all of your emails populate your inbox.
Good luck! 👋🏼😉
Smiliñ 😎 Brian
Apple Mail duplicating emails in inbox on Mac or iCloud
