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Mail lost a 'sent' message - why?

I recently sent a mail (IMAP) from my .mac address to a person I often email. Got the 'swoosh' etc. A couple of days later, I wanted to check up on what I'd said, so I looked in 'Sent', only to find no trace of that individual mail - there were a lot of other messages in 'Sent'. I began to doubt if my mail had indeed been sent, but then my correspondent replied, complete with my original mail as a quotation! So the send worked, but the sent mail was mysteriously deleted (and no, it wasn't in the mail trash either). What could possibly have caused this? I don't know any way of avoiding the 'Sent' mailbox, so I can't imagine what mechanism could have caused it. Has anyone any ideas? I am scared that this may happen again - I rely heavily on the 'Sent' mailbox to remind me of stuff I've written.

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), New for 2012. 8Gb

Posted on Aug 29, 2015 2:34 AM

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10 replies

Aug 29, 2015 2:41 AM in response to Living Fossil

Imap accounts (especially gmail) often have a separate set of boxes in the left pannel in Mail.

it can be hidden or not: when hidden, move the mouse cursor over the mail account and then unhide becomes visible, unhide.

then choose the sent mailbox there, in the Mail->menu->mailbox choose "Use this mailbox" and choose "sent mailbox": this will move the sent items to the combined sent mailbox of all accounts. You can do alike for all mailboxes in the "extra" Mail account, it is rather self explanatory.


Aug 29, 2015 6:37 AM in response to Lexiepex

Thanks again.


1. Yes I see the 'show/hide' on both my accounts (the iCloud one and the gmail) but neither is hidden. In particular, both 'Sent' boxes are clearly visible.


2. I have used the Mail 'Search' feature to look for my sent email. I can find other mails sent to the same person, but of this one I'm talking about, no trace in any mailbox. It is true that sometimes the Search feature doesn't work properly - searching 'All' sometimes doesn't find stuff which I can show is actually there - but as far as I can I have also done a visual inspection and haven't found it. There are some thousands of emails on my system so I couldn't visually inspect them all.

Aug 29, 2015 12:43 PM in response to Eric Root

Thanks Eric for that advice: I rebuilt the index, and I was about to re-index the messages, when I realised that both these operations are local to the Mac I'm using. This isn't the Mac that sent the original message which I've lost - that's in another country! I am relying on iCloud to keep my mail in sync between my various devices and locations - normally this works flawlessly. In case you wondered, I have used the web interface to my iCloud account to look directly at the 'sent' mailbox in iCloud, but my lost message isn't there either. Can I do these index operations on the iCloud copies of my mailboxes? It makes me a tad nervous, so I'd appreciate advice on this.

Aug 31, 2015 1:33 AM in response to Eric Root

Thanks - I don't think I quite understand what you're saying. I have always had 'sent messages stored on the server' set, since as I said I am a heavy sharer of mail over different Apple devices (two Macs, two iPads and an iPhone), and for me the 'sent' box is a valuable resource. If I understand you correctly, re-indexing will actually re-index on all my devices simultaneously, or at least all the devices will get the newly indexed information from iCloud - is this what you mean? Sorry to be dumb.

Mail lost a 'sent' message - why?

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