GoDaddy IMAP automatically deleting/disappearing emails from Inbox, solved!
We're running a unibody Macbook 13" with Mac OS X 10.5.8, all patches, and Apple Mail 3.6.
When we moved from Earthlink POP to GoDaddy IMAP, we almost immediately started losing emails from the Inbox. They would literally disappear before our eyes.
We checked online, found others with the same problem, and no actual fixes (some workarounds, such as switching to GoDaddy Exchange email).
I called GoDaddy for help today. Aside from the usual run-down: Are you sure it isn't configured as POP? Did you check that any other devices aren't getting the emails as POP?, we finally got a new solution I hadn't heard before:
Turn off Auto Purging.
If you log into GoDaddy Webmail, right-click on the Inbox, and click Auto-Purging, a little setting pane comes up.
If Auto Purging is already turned off, turn it off again anyway, and make sure the little pop-up confirming the setting has been saved comes up in the bottom right corner.
This seems to have fixed the problem. We've gone for about an hour now without the emails disappearing.
What's more, I got lucky and found that the emails had been thrown into the Trash by the Auto Purge feature, so I could retrieve them (some of them disappeared before Time Machine could back them up).
One important possibility: I discovered that I had mapped the Trash folder to Deleted Messages and not to GoDaddy's Trash folder. So I set this to point to GoDaddy's Trash thinking that this might help. It MIGHT have been what fixed the problem, but it's not likely.
A few other notes to help you guys:
1) We weren't losing emails from any IMAP folder except the Inbox.
2) I tried setting the IMAP folder path to / but that broke the subfolders.
3) After turning off the Auto-Purge and dragging the deleted emails back into the Inbox from the Trash (using Apple Mail to do so), there were duplicates of these emails in the GoDaddy Webmail Inbox that did not show in the Apple Mail Inbox.
4) Using other mail clients like Thunderbird didn't help. The iPad and iPhone would eventually lose the emails too as everything sync'd up with the server.
Hope that helps somebody!