Problem with imap email accounts- unread messages marked as read

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Problem with imap email accounts- unread messages marked as read

I have a few different accounts connected to my business. When someone cc's a message to two of my accounts (for example "orders@*****.com" and "office@*****.com", and I read the message in one account (in the apple mail interface), it gets marked as read in the other account as well. They are two totally separate email accounts. It seems like apple is trying to do me a smart favor by detecting the second message as a duplicate and marking it as read, but it is causing problems for me and I'm wondering if there's a way around it. For now I've set up some rules to make sure the messages don't get lost in the cracks but they are clumsy workarounds and I'd really just like the message to remain unread in each mailbox until the intended assistant sees it there and reads it. Thanks for any advice!

Posted on Feb 24, 2015 5:11 PM

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Answer 1

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,739 points

Feb 24, 2015 5:55 PM in response to jtstudio

Mail considers two messages to be the same if they have the same body but different headers. The header contains information such as the date and sender. The default behavior is to group duplicate messages and show them as a single message. See this support article for instructions to view the duplicates.

Mail counts a group of duplicates as one message for the purpose of showing the number of messages in a mailbox. As a result, you may get different results when counting messages in Mail and in another mail client, such as webmail.

If you prefer to disable the grouping of duplicates, see below.

Quit Mail.

Back up all data before continuing.

Please triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:

defaults write -app Mail _AlwaysShowDuplicates YES

Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.

Launch the built-in Terminal application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.

Paste into the Terminal window by pressing the key combination command-V. I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, you may have to press the return key after pasting.

Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear below what you entered. You can then quit Terminal.

To revert to the default behavior, enter this command in the same way:

defaults delete -app Mail _AlwaysShowDuplicates

Credit for this observation to ASC member Tom Francais.

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Answer 2

jtstudio Author

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Feb 25, 2015 4:31 PM in response to Linc Davis

Linc, Thanks so much for the reply! I've tried both suggestions and unfortunately haven't gotten it to work yet; the problem is still happening even though reading through the fix you recommended, it made perfect sense. My partner is a programmer and I'm going to have him walk through it with me to see if there's something about the way I did it that is preventing it from taking effect. I do have three computers (and an iPhone), all checking mail with the apple mail interface, and I did the same command in the terminal in all three (after quitting mail) but there may be something else I'm not thinking of. If you have any other thoughts I'd love to hear- and if we're able to get it fixed after a second round I'll let you know!

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Answer 3

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,739 points

Feb 25, 2015 5:27 PM in response to jtstudio

Did you quit Mail before running the command? If not, it had no effect.

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Answer 4

jtstudio Author

Level 1

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Feb 25, 2015 7:02 PM in response to Linc Davis

Hi Linc, The first time I forgot to quit Mail first- then I remembered and I quit Mail, pasted the command, quit Terminal and re-launched Mail. I didn't see any change so I quit mail again, pasted the reverse command into terminal, then re-pasted the fix. Still not working- but I'm not very experienced with this so there may be something I did wrong that would be totally obvious to someone sitting here watching me, that I don't know to mention! So I'm going to go through it again with my partner and see if he can shed any light. Thanks for checking in!

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