Mac mail automatically deleting emails

This happened to me and thanks to this site, I found that the setting on my iPhone was to delete mail messages after seven days and so I changed it to "never" so that I can access past emails that are older than a week old. Now time will tell but I bet that my phone and laptop were synced and that is what happened. My laptop does not have a setting for when to delete emails.

Do you have any rules setop?

Have you looked in Mail>Preferences>Accounts>Advanced tab?

But with it not showing, is this what you tried...

Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), it will try to repair your Disk Directory while the spinning radian is happening, so let it go, run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, then move these folder & file to the Desktop.

Move this Folder to the Desktop...

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Caches/Mail/

Move this file to the Desktop...

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail/Envelope Index

Reboot.

If that doesn't do it and you can afford to redo all your Rules, try these & reboot...

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist

/Users/YourUserName/Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist.backup

Can you use WebMail in a Browser to view your Mail on their Server, most have that feature.

With 2 different Apps & computers doing it, it sort of does point to a problem on the other end.

Whew, thanks for the report Beth! 🙂

I can hardly believe someone else has had my exact same problem. I used to use Entourage when this started happening and I thought it was the app. So I switched to Mail. Soon enough, the problem found me again. It took HOURS, over DAYS, for Apple to untangle the POP/IMAP mess, but the problem kept returning.

I got on the phone with my email provider. Why wouldn't they warn customers that they're changing from POP to IMAP? I have lost all kinds of business correspondence due to the conflicts in settings between my desktop and mobile devices.

Now I understand why (my mobile devices!) Thank you for posting the problem and the solution!

Is there a way to recover the deleted messages?
I've been having the same problem for months (messages randomly being deleted from both the sent and inbox folders) but I'm not sure it's a POP/IMAP issue. I've just discovered today that an entire month's worth of sent messages has been deleted from the Mac Mail client.

Does anyone have an idea how to fix this without canceling accounts?

I am also having this problem. It has been occuring for about a week now. I don't have the option to cancel any accounts. I have one account with gmail which I use to corresond with literally hundreds of people, professionally and personally so I need to keep the account. I've looked on my iPhone and don't see any option for erasing (or not erasing) old emails from my inbox. I've also looked through Preferences on my Mac computers. There isn't anything there either.

BTW, if you really need to retrieve a lost email, you may be able to do it through the Time Machine. I just looked at mine and could see old emails, but I'm afraid of pushing the restore button, assuming that it will replace the more recent emails.

There is a setting in Apple Mail that can also automatically delete all emails odler than "x days" without telling you. And the default is "older than 1 month". Here is how to access the setting:

Preferences-> Accounts -> highlight your account (gmail for me) ->Mailbox Behavior

Under "Trash" category in the bottom set "Permanently erase deleted messages when" to "Never"

click another tab on top (like "General") and Mail will ask you to save the changes. Close the Preference window.

Thank you!

The truth is that I've effectively stopped using Mail because I got so scared of my messages disappearing and can't afford for that to keep happening.

I did change the setting, as you suggested above but am still nervous to retry Mail.

Thanks for your help!

Same happened to me, I had a POP-account appearing on my iPhone that I deleted, because I changed it to IMAP. I also choosed to erase deleted messages from the server after a month. Now, there are no e-mails left. My provider doesn't have them, not in Time Machine, just permantly deleted from my INBOX without me even choosing to do this.

I'm having the same problem. Preferences are set to never erase deleted messages, yet they self-erase after a week. I suspect it does have something to do with switching from POP to IMAP.

Hi, I know your post was from a few years ago but i am having the same problem now. messages in my inbox on my macbook get deleted after two weeks but last a lot longer on my other devices. it sounds like you figured out how to fix it but it was clear to me from reading what i actually have to do? any guidance would be appreciated. thanks, JZ

Hi, is this a POP or IMAP account?

Who is your eMail provider, the part after the @ sign?