MAC Mail not saving all sent items

I have the same problem, exactly as described by PVQ. I am on OS 10.8

It is now Tuesday 4th sept and the problem still persists. I have just bought a brand new mac book air and I thought I was going mad until I saw these posts as I was sure that I'd sent certain things but couldn't find them anywhere in my sent folder. This has caused VERY serious problems for me as I'm dealing with a very complicated issue which needs me to refer to previous correspondance. If anyone has a solution ( i've tried and failed with the few odd suggestionthat helped certain individuals out ) and none of them work. HELP!!!!!!!!!!!

This seems like such a silly problem for Apple to be struggling with. I've found the best workaround for this issue for me is to enable the "Automatic BCC myself" feature within Mail options. At least I know I'll have a record of what was sent, although it can get messy in the inbox if you don't develop a habit of moving those BCC messages "from yourself" to another folder, titled "My Sent messages". Good luck!

M

Thank you for that tip. I agree that its messy but at least its an interim solution. Its so depressing given that it seems to be an intermittant problem ( which I would assume should make it fixable if it does at least work sometimes???!!!) and takes a lot of uneccessary backtracking and of course leaves any stream of information wide open to errors aaaaarggghhh!!!! Anyhow thanks again and if i hear anything else I will be sure to contact you!

One thing I have recently discovered is smart folders. This makes organizing things SUPER easy and will not be affected by Mac Mail's horrible behavior (a smart folder is just like a filter applied to your existing emails), since it doesn't actually copy anything.

What you can do is set up a smart folder that filters emails in your inbox that are from you, but not sent to you. This means you were the sender, and most likely were BCC'd. One more step, show all messages from your sent folder. This will mean you have two copies of each message in the smart folder, unless your "Sent" message didn't get saved. In this case, you should be able to easily find those anomolies and copy them into your real sent folder.

I recently was looking for a way to simulate what Outlook does with AutoArchive, and I found that making a smart folder filtered on age allows me to just copy the messages from my inbox and sent items to the appropriate locally-stored folders. I still have to deal with the dreadded Mac Mail's seemingly random ability to corrupt my messages, but at least I'm not over my quota...

I think this is one of the biggest warts I've seen on my Mac since switching over last November -- I'm actually shocked this is such a long-standing problem, and it does not give me good confidence in Apple's support. I have to say, I really really like mac mail, one of the best clients I've ever used. But this one issue pretty much cancels all that out. It would be like having an iPhone that can run all the apps, but fails to make phone calls.

I recommend MailHub : http://dervishsoftware.com/

(I have no connection with the company!)

I found out about it through a "MacUpdate" promo" and tried the free download.

I has made me more efficient with keeping my inbox & sent mail organized as well as eliminating the problem (so far as i can tell!)

For every outgoing mail you are prompted for where you want to save it - and MailHub suggests where based on your prior selections (and where you have stored mail received from/or this person before).

LOVE THIS PROGRAM!!

I found this simple solution in another thread and it worked for me. Please forgive if if it was already discussed here. I don't have time to read this entire discussion right now:

"Log into icloud.com and go in Mail. On the upper right corner, you should see a wheel to get into your Mail preferences. Under the general tab, make sure that the Mailboxes option saying "Save sent message in" is checked and that the selected folder is actually your "Sent" mailbox."

Send yourself a test email to see if it worked. This method started saving my sent messages in both iCloud and Mac Mail client (on my iMac). Unfortunately, a lot of mail I sent prior to this fix was never saved.

Wow. I thought Mail in the iPhone / iPad was lacking until I moved back to Mac on a notebook about two months ago. On the plus side, its nice to know the troubles aren't mine alone. Misery loves company.

This intermittent failure to place email in the Sent folder is clearly unacceptable - and clearly well-documented - but Apple seems preoccupied with bells and whistles rather than fixing the programs / apps they already have. Users simply need to be able to have their correspondence available to review and the (assumed) confirmation the Mail was actually sent out. Not every email users send out are simply greetings to, say, family members and where confirmation may not be needed. If Apple wants to compete with real business OSs and their software, it's got to get it's act together.

Resetting the iCloud Mail as suggested by Mr Fisticuffs didn't work for me, so I'm using the work around suggested by majch. Typically enough, the test to see that worked actually placed the BCC in my Inbox - and the Sent Folder - the first email today to do so. Smart folders can wait till another day...

Alternative Mail programs are an option, if a pain in the butt and a use of resources one shouldn't need to be using. Apple - pay attention (not that they actually read these Forums....)

I have same problem the mail is sent and recieved but NOTHING is saved in my sent file

I recommend MailHub for mac - it files things for you. Not only solveds the problem but has made me more organized and purposeful in the emails that I do save.

(I have no financial interest in MailHub - just found it as a MacUpdate Promo one day....)

I got MailHub since joining this thread to solve this very problem, and I like it quite a bit because of several features. But every once in a while the same thing happens that this thread is about: sent mail doesn't always get saved, even with MailHub installed.

This problem doesn't happen anywhere near as MUCH as when MailHub wasn't installed (and even before I installed it the problem was only an intermittent but highly annowing occurrence), but still.

So I'd say if you want to reduce the occurrences of this underlying Mac Mail problem and get some great new mail feautures at the same time, in my experience MailHub is a big plus. But it isn't a complete fix for this.

Dear all,

try to sync your accounts. It helped in my case which was as your ones.

Go to the lower left corner and click on this "screw" or so (3rd button from left).

Go on "account information" and look after the mail account that makes you problems.

Click on the account's sent-folder inside of the account info - window. It should automatically re-sync the account or, at least, this folder. If not, you might click on the button "Show mails" in the lower right corner of this window, too.

Good luck!

It just happened again. My reply to an email didn't saved in my Sent folder, or anywhere else. And I'm using MailHub, so that for sure tells me MailHub doesn't fix this intermittent problem (I still like MH, though).

This is obviously a problem with Mac Mail itself, and it's a pretty bad one. True, for me it only happens very occasionally. But, when it does, I have no record of my part of an email exchange. Most emails, I couldn't care less. But for some of them, like the one I just sent, it does matter.

I'm going to have to start BCCing myself now, because more than once I needed to look again at what I wrote in my reply.

FYi this happens on my iPhone and ipad too with yahoo using the native mail app. I even downloaded the yahoo app and it happens there as well. It does NOT happen with my gmail account though!

gmail is a different bird altogether. They place a copy of sent messages to the Sent folder server-side, as long as it's sent through their SMTP server. So, it will go there regardless of what client you are using.