MAC Mail not saving all sent items

I have a few posts here, as have several others. Random sent messages are not stored locally or on the IMAP server. You may uncheck the "Store sent messages on the server" box and they may not be lost locally. Otherwise, to the best of my knowledge, the recipient does receive them, but if they reply to you and you click your original message, it will not be found. I received a message from techincal support saying that the Mac Mail group is working on the problem (posted earlier, after I captured the symptom). In addition to this longstanding problem, the new Mac Mail has other problems. When I delete messages they should go to Trash and stay there, but when I return to the Inbox, they reappear, like the folders are not being synchronized again. These problems are not being addressed to Apple's usually excellent standards. Over many months, this thread and others and countless calls to support have reported this problem. Lots of finger-pointing deflects the attention and responsibility between Apple and the ISPs. As I have many Macs and smart phones that access the Email, it is critical that IMAP be supported fully and problem-free.

We solved the problem by deleting the mail account from our Bluehost service...and at the same time deleting it from all deivces. (Computer and iOS)

Recreating the exact account....(using different password) and then running tests of sending an email to the new account....each time someone recreated it on a device or computer in Apple Mail.

So far so good.

I wonder if and old keychain might have somethign to do with it. The one thing we did change was the password.

Hello Everyone:

It seems this has been an issue we've all been dealing with since upgrading to Lion/switching to iCloud.

I have a SOLUTION and I hope this helps...I by no means am a computer guru, but this seemed to have helped me out and a few others I know that were having this very issue.

I just figured this out, so I hope the solution is what you need.

WHAT I WAS EXPERIENCING:

I have multiple devices and run 3 IMAP accounts through my apple mail. Once I upgraded my operating system/switched to iCloud, all of my sent messages on my devices (iPad and iPhone) disappeared. I would send an email from one device, but they did not show up when I needed to refer to them later. Plus I didn't know if the recipient received the email. It was like they disappeared all together-very bizarre! After a call to AppleCare and a few hours of troubleshooting, this is what I found.

HOW I FIXED IT:

In order to get your sent messages on the server, in each account you need to do the following (if you haven't already):

On your iPad:

Settings>Mail, Contacts, Calendars>Accounts>Choose your IMAP account>Advanced>Mailbox Behaviors>On the Server> Choose Sent Messages.

For some odd reason, the default is set to ON MY iPad or ON MY iPhone once someone migrates to iCloud/Upgrades their operating system. It's easy to overlook.

On your iPhone:

Settings>Mail, Contacts, Calendars>Accounts>Choose your IMAP account>Advanced>Mailbox Behaviors>On the Server> Choose Sent Messages. (Basically the same thing)

Apple told me to delete and recreate all of my IMAP accounts, but it seemed like there could have been an easier fix than that.

I'm not saying this will fix EVERYBODY's issue, but it certainly fixed mine. iCloud and Lion changed the default settings and it's not very obvious on how to fix it.

I hope this helps!

*Good Luck*

The first one who talk about the problem on that discussion is chrisaxe21 more than a year ago.

I have exactly the same problem for a month:

Message I send (espacialy the first one for few hours or espacialy the one with attached folder) are not saved in sent message mailbox. The matter is than we're loosing all trace of that message on our computer or server, but recipient received it.

I realised that when I was trying to find a important message I send to someone, because that message was suppose to be the proof in court thant a custumer receaved an invoice. So now I have nothing!!!

This proplem is very serious and I do not understand why nobody gave a real solution... neather mac team???

We all are using Mac because it is suppose to be friendly use right?

So how come I have to write here to find out a solution and there's nothing ???

So now my request is to the firts message chrisaxe21. Did you resolve your problem after 15 mounths? Did you change mail system or did you change your mac for windows system?

Please is there a way to fix it?

Thanx,

fred

P.S. leave me alone with solutions for ipad or iphone!!!

I have had this problem since the very start, i have 5 imap accounts and most days atleast one sent item disappears.

this forum is quite frustrating because;

- many people are misunderstanding the original issue (and confusing it with 'settings' such as imap store folder options) or not understanding the intermittent nature of it again thinking it is settings related.

- that apple have no resolution and dont seem to have acknowledged that a failed SENT item gets piped to null instead of kept in an offline box for retrying.

this is the real issue, as you can see in your console output, the message gets 'nulled' when any attempt to store it in the imap sent items fails, which could be related to internet connectivity or just any other transient network activitities going on at or between you and the server. Network applications need to assume that network transaction 'can fail' and program around that with recoveries and retries : this is just extremely poor error handling on apples part.

SO, i have recently switched to Sparrow Mail (available in the app store) : and its great! not had a single issue.

it does take a little getting used to as i really was so accustomed to the inbuilt apple mail client, but this thing handles imap perfectly.

goto Sparrow Mail : it works!

Well stated, Dusolais. This is a serious problem demanding much more attention than Apple is giving it.

Unfortunately, Sparrow Mail is not an option for me. I use multiple IMAP accounts, not all of them Google Mail accounts, and I cannot find a way in Sparrow to establish separate "Reply-To" addresses for each of them.

Zguy,

Yeah unfortunately a lot of people seem to be confusing the true issue by mentioning unrelated 'fixes' (which are not fixes, they are simply misconfigurations), and i think that clouds the issue from apple techies who might see the odd post here, as only every Nth post is actually truely 'on topic' 😟

Re Sparrow Mail : i am running 5 separate imap accounts, none of them google accounts, from rackspace (previously mailtrust) and other hosts, without an issue : i get a separate reply-from address in each email.

For example, i can view all accounts as a consolidated single inbox OR separate inboxes per each imap account, it intelligently select the send-from address according to either which inbox is selected or where the email im replying was 'send to'.

so if someone sends an email to address1, and i reply, i am sending 'from address1' : conversely for address2 and so on.

Works for me 🙂 this is the latest version of sparrow to date, i have never tried a prior version, maybe you have ?

Cheers.

Thanks for your reply.

My mail needs are somewhat different. Sparrow handles each account as you describe. My problem is that I desire the "Reply-To" address for ALL accounts to be yet another address, the "catch-all" mail address for my domain. My mail forwarding service collects the replies directed to this address and delivers them to an account of my choice. In this way I may originate mail from separate accounts and receive the replies in a single account. I have been unable to figure this out in Sparrow and have seen other posts claiming Sparrow cannot do this. Please feel free to prove me wrong. If Sparrow can do this for me I will replace Apple Mail with Sparrow in a heartbeat.

Regards.

Oh okay, the account setup in Sparrow is quite limited in that regard. I dont immediately see a way to do this with the available options so i think your right. Thanks for clarifying that, it sounds like a nice solution indeed.

Right now i am often overlooking the from field when composing and accidentally composing emails to people from the wrong domains etc, which can confuse clients and looks unprofessional so i have been considering a changeup in the way im doing it now.

I find it strange that there is only a single alternative to mail on the app store, i would have thought there would be 10's of imap clients available 😟

I just read where Google has announced the acquisition of Sparrow. Looks like there will be one less Mac IMAP client from which to choose. 😟

****, for 25 million !!

So it's now July, and still no fix? Has anyone heard any news on this from apple? It is incredible that this problem persisits, trying to avoid switching mail client... Apple help us!

I called mac support two days ago and they ask me autorisation to take 50$ from mi credit card. She could'nt tell me if thay was able to fix that (and when we looking on that discussion we believe not).

Do I have to pay for Apple's problems? worst...chez was to trying to make me believe it was a trouble shooting with my imac!!!

im sorry to hear that fredorakis, if you are experiencing the exact symptoms as described it is really unfortunate that apple support are so far unable to recognize a bug. it certainly is not a 'troubleshooting problem' and they are just wasting your time and theirs.

if you run 'console' (hit the finder icon in the top right and type 'console'), and watch the output when this problem occurs, you will clearly see that Mail outputs an error saving in the sent imap folder, which then gets piped to null instead of being saved locally for any retry attempts.

This is clearly a bug and a problem which has been well documented by many technically competent people and even acknowledged by atleast one apple support team as mentioned in a previous message here, where they said they were aware of it and working on it. That was i believe a year ago, i simply dont believe them.

I am really super disappointed in apple to get something so simple so wrong and then to simply ignore it and continue to waste customers time.

Same here. Come on, Apple. It's time to solve that. I've just bought a MacBook air few days ago and noticed this problem. It would be ridiculous to use the web-based email to not loose anything.