Bug warning - Mac Mail Undo Delete loses email

Ya, this has been happening to me for a long long time. I try to avoid it as I wait for a fix, but I just did it again and lost an important email, for ever, or course. This is a pretty destructive bug, but then again, Apple doesn't seem all too concerned with bugs in their software anymore.

Somebody at Apple - please just try this out (with any gmail account):

1. select your most important email
2. hit your 'delete' key
3. immediately try to undo it with 'command+z'
4. weep, because there's no getting it back

Wow, yeah just got hit hard with this one. No sign of the messages in Gmail (web) on on-disk. Fortunately these weren't critical; useful, but not critical.

Mike

Hi Matt

Yep, fully up-to-date (13A603 - not sure if that got updated with the mail patch).

Cheers,

Mike

Yep, Nov 8th - links to http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6030. I'll file a radar...

What if you use "undo delete" from the edit menu?

Yep – just tried that (with a worthless email of course) and it's gone for good. The key here is that the undo happens before Mail has finished its first round-trip to the IMAP server to trash/archive the email.

I'm not an IMAP expert, but I assume this bug is half an issue with Mail and half an issue with Gmail, in that Google treats trash/archive differently than an old-school email provider, and Apple is making assumptions that really can't be made.

This really needs to be fixed though...

liveintensely wrote:

Somebody at Apple - please just try this out (with any gmail account):

1. select your most important email
2. hit your 'delete' key
3. immediately try to undo it with 'command+z'
4. weep, because there's no getting it back

You will need to get in touch with Apple.

FEEDBACK http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

These are only user to user forums.

Cheers

Pete

I'm using Yahoo account (POP) and no issues.

Thank you so much for reporting this. Has this been filed as a bug in Radar? I'm still seeing it in 10.9.2! 😟

Goofy thing is with two computers on 10.9.2 with the same email acounts, only one has the problem.

I tried to match the settings exactly.

Out of desperation and guesswork I unchecked "Store deleted messages on the server" and now I can undelete.

There's no logical reason why that should have worked.

Well, I've seen two outcomes from typing command-Z: usually it seems to work, and then a few seconds later the restored message disappears permanently. But sometimes, command-Z doesn't restore the message.

Could a timing issue be involved? I would imagine that not storing deleted messages on the server would resolve the problem, since given the multithreading involved via IMAP, could it be possible that the undo would execute before the delete and have unexpected results?

I can confirm this issue also occurs with Mavericks Mail (updated all the way) when configured with an "IMAP Exchange" account on a Kerio Connect server. So not just gmail.

I have had this issue using IMAP mail + Mavericks Mail. Today after accidentally deleting an important email I did some Googling and discovered this is not Apple's fault. There is a IMAP term 'Expunging' which means delete and refers to how the server treats emails that the client has deleted. Search Google for "apple mail server expunging" to find some explanations. Our company has a mailserver called Kerio Connect and its default behaviour is to delete any emails from the server that the user deletes. So there is no possibility to Undelete in Apple mail as the email has gone from the server. I have changed the default on the server not to 'expunge' and now I can undelete.

This might be the same issue with Gmail. I don't know as I don't use it.