Mail not deleting message on google IMAP

Double-check your Gmail IMAP settings within Mail to ensure that Mail's version of your Gmail account's Trash folder is actually mapped to the Trash label on the Gmail servers:

1. In Mail's left-most pane (where the mail folders and IMAP accounts are listed), show the entire contents of your Gmail's account structure. If the Trash folder is still listed there, it is not mapped to the Trash folder "on your Mac" for Gmail.

2. Select the Trash folder under the Gmail account

3. Under the "Mailbox" menu item, click on the "Use this mailbox for..." option and select Trash

4. The trash folder under your Gmail account structure will seem to disappear. In actuality, the contents of that folder will now be displayed in the Trash mailbox up the pane. If done correctly, that mailbox should now have a selection triangle next to it and when opened will reveal the Gmail Trash folder in it.

What all this does is ensure that when you delete the contents of that Trash mailbox, the contents of the Gmail account's Trash will also be marked for deletion (or immediately purged, depending up on you have that set up with Gmail itself).

FYI, you can also do this with the Sent, Drafts, and Junk/Spam folders for any IMAP account. This ensures that the actions you take in Mail will be synched to the appropriate mailboxes/folders in your other IMAP accounts.

Check your mail settings in your gmail account using a browser. There is an option under IMAP settings. Select When I mark a message as deleted. Auto expunge on.

I picked that tip up from someone a couple of years when I was struggling with that same problem. I'm glad it worked for you. 🙂

hmmm.. that sounds good but it doesn't work on my mail app (or maybe I'm not able to do it xD)

I still have my 450 emails in the inbox... uff Could you explain with some screenshots? would be very helpful..thanks

Thanks for the suggestion but it doesn't work. When I click on 'use this mailbox for', it is all grayed out. I am on an old operating system (OS X), with mail version 3.6 and probably set up my mail inbox as a pop server. Would I need to change that to IMAP for your solution to work?

THANK YOU! This was driving me crazy, and came out of the blue after I'd been using Gmail/Apple Mail just fine for a couple of weeks. Simple solution, and it's restored my sanity!

One other thing seemed to be necessary in my case (alumni Gmail account). When I had "auto expurge on", it would not let the messages go to the trash I think, but rather archived them. When I turned it to off, I could then select "Move messages to the trash" and really delete them rather than archive.

One other question (since I now have a lot of leftover archived messages). The ones I thought I deleted are all mixed in with the ones I'm keeping for now. This is the gmail equivalent of "All Mail", correct? So I'm assuming there's no way to figure out which ones should have been deleted except to read them again, correct?

Thanks!

Ick. It looks like other messages in the thread I thought I deleted part of went into Archive. Not until I dragged the lot into the drash (not hit delete) did they go there. Any way to get this result without dragging?