Apple Mail - IMAP and Lost / Deleted mail

revDAVE wrote:

I will send a small text IMAP mail

Point of clarification, IMAP is for incoming mail. When you send gmail, SMTP is used. Since your problem is random I suspect your SMTP configuration is correct. Have you checked Mail | Preferences | Accounts | gmail | Mailbox behaviors to verify "Store sent messages on server" is enabled, and "Delete sent messages when" is set to Never?

When you state sent messages are not in the mailbox sent folder, have you also checked whether the sent messages appear: (1) In Mail in the Sent Items folder under the the gmail account? (2) In the gmail web interface in the Sent Items list (label)?

If it isn't an obvious setting, try deleting and recreating the gmail account in Mail.

Hi there

Just had the same behaviour of Apple Mail client for the second time. Today it happened with my iCloud account the other day when sending mail using my business exchange account. In my case these where large messages with attachements. I have received a confirmation beep, but then nothing showed up in Sent Messages, the mail simply disapeared.

I guess this issue is neither connected to the mail providers (different mail accounts) nor to the ISP as it happened on two different networks.

Would be great to know about the cause of this and have it fixed soon.

This still happens to me with Lion 10.7.2 and Mail 5.1. I'm really concerned about this since I use my email as a business record. I'd have all the settings correct, because it does work most of the time.

I've noticed maybe 1 out of every 20 sent messages is missing. It's the mail app's responsibility to save the sent message to the designated folder after sending, and in my case this folder is the Sent folder of my IMAP account.

I guess to be safe we'll have to switch to local Sent Items folders, but that goes against the main reason for using IMAP in the first place.

This is a VERY serious bug in Apple Mail.

I have been experiencing the same problems with sent messages not appearing in my Sent folder. Furthermore, messages in my Drafts folder are often not deleted after being sent. However, the biggest problem is that messages that I move from one folder (typically Inbox or Sent) to another (typically a custom folder for record-keeping purposed) mysteriously disappear after a while. I have verified that the message is successfully moved from the source folder to the destination folder, and I have been able to sucessful view the messages immediately after the move. However, after a few weeks or so, I returned to my folder to find the moved messages, and some of them were gone. Older and newer messages were still in my folder, but almost randomly, a recently moved message or a group of related messages seem to disappear!

Having said that, I should point out that I had a similar problem with Microsoft Outlook 2010. In both cases, using Apple Mail under Mac OS X (both 10.6 and 10.7) and Outlook under Windows 7, I was syncing my Yahoo! e-mail via IMAP. The problem, it seems, has to do more with Yahoo! than Apple Mail. That's not to say that a problem doesn't exist---losing e-mails is definitely a big deal---but if you search the web, it seems that over 90% of these "lost mail" complaints involve Yahoo! free e-mail and IMAP.

I just switched my companies email to imap.. Some users are still in snow leopard and some in lion. Everyone is complaining about losing emails.. Either typing a new one or replying to an old.. I notice when it happens it looks like the email gets hung up a little in the activity bar .. Then it whooshes out and 1 of 3 things happens... 1. the email is lost forever.. its not in sent folder either up on the rackspace server or locally on our machines. This means we have to be careful to check that each and every email we send actually makes it to the sent box. if its a new email it has to be typed over. 2. the receiver sometime gets it but mostly does not.. and sometimes, not sure if this is even related ,an outgoing email just ends up in drafts and does not get sent out the first try. This happens haphazardy, but we are trying th isolate the problem... Our mac metwork consultant is at a loss at the moment..

All outgoing settings have been checked and rechecked and are correct.. We have these variables, macmail, rackspace maiil hosting, cablevision ISP, ethernet and or airport wireless networks.. As you can well imagiine this is not good for our business..

Anybody have any additional insight?

I can verify that not all e-mails make it to the Sent folder. I'm sorry that I have a solution to offer, but I too have noticed that sometimes the e-mail goes out to the recipient without being saved to the Sent folder, and sometimes it's simply lost---not in Sent, and the recipient doesn't receive it either.

I think something is seriously wrong with Apple Mail's IMAP code. It could be that my problem with Yahoo Mail is not entirely Yahoo's problem after all.

Important update regarding Apple Mail and Yahoo! in particular (this does not apply to the Sent items/lost outgoing message problem): Apple Mail is not at fault! I lost several messages when I moved them from my Inbox and Sent folders to another custom folder, and I thought Apple Mail was at fault, but according yo Yahoo!, it seems that my problem was actually caused by a sync issue between another mobile device (an Android phone) and Yahoo! mail.

Here is part of Yahoo!'s e-mail regarding this issue:

We recently experienced an issue syncing emails for some of our users when accessing email from an IMAP device like an iPhone or an Android phone. Emails that you might have moved from your inbox to folders (including the trash folder) may have been temporarily unavailable. We fixed this issue, and recovered emails that may not have been synced to the right folder. [...] We have automatically added a folder called "Synced Messages" to your email account today located in the left navigation of your inbox.

I wonder if my occasional Sent folder issue is also a Yahoo! problem, not Apple Mail?

Going back to the corporate IMAP (i.e. non-Yahoo!) issue mentioned by Mitchell Group, what kind of e-mail server are you using? I have never experienced IMAP issues with my corporate e-mail server (Zimbra Collaborartion Suite on Linux) using Apple Mail (IMAP) as a client. My only headache, to this day, has been with Yahoo!

Apple acknowledges this as an issue with the mail program, see https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3065096?answerId=17990954022#17990954022 for additional insight