Mac Mail odd folder with Exchange account

Question

Mac Mail odd folder with Exchange account

At our office we recently moved from an internal mail server for the office Exchange account to Office 365. There is an odd folder showing up on all Macs running anything from El Capitan back to Lion where a folder called "Files" has shown up in the list of folder icons in the sidebar. This folder does not show up when logged in to Office 365 via a web browser but it behaves like a distinguished folder as it can not be deleted (much like the Conversations folder and new Clutter folder).

Inside the folder called "Files" appears to be a collection of receipts of any email that had an attachment either sent or received. No actually content, just a bunch of time and date stamp info, file name, and some times some code. Always displayed as NO SENDER.

Any idea what this is and how we make it go away?

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013), OS X El Capitan (10.11.1)

Posted on Aug 12, 2016 5:57 PM

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Answer 1

May 10, 2017 9:35 PM in response to commanderclif_me

Well, it's May 2017 and I have this problem with my relatively new Office 365 account, iMac. It's extremely annoying and disconcerting at the same time because I'm worried that all the crap in that "files' mailbox is taking up disk space and might cause problems later. I'm afraid to delete anything in there, although I have confirmed that they are just weird duplicate messages from any message with an attachment.

Anyone know who I should I contact - MS or Apple?

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Answer 2

Aug 15, 2016 6:46 PM in response to commanderclif_me

I have also been experiencing this issue.

Not sure what exactly is causing it, but any attachment sent or received is being stripped of its text and a blank email with no addressee sits in the 'files' folder.

When I run Outlook on Mac or Office365 in browser, I can't see the 'files' folder.

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Answer 3

Aug 16, 2016 6:51 AM in response to mr.robert.

I had our IT folks who moved us to Office365 look in to it as well. His response was it was some how connected to the new CLUTTER folder feature. He thinks it will eventually come to MS's attention and will get addressed but as of now, not a way to hid or remove. He also confirmed this is not just a Mac thing, he was able to see the FILES folder on a PC as well.

I thought I might try and go in to the online version of Office365 Mail and see if there was a way to turn off the CLUTTER feature and see if it went away. If I have success, I'll report back!

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Answer 4

Aug 18, 2016 8:09 AM in response to commanderclif_me

I spent some time investigating this with a Microsoft engineer today.

I have replicated the issue on Macs running both El Capitan and Yosemite;

The issue occurs with all Office365 accounts I have tested so far;

The "Files" folder is not present if you use Outlook 2016 either on Mac or Windows (7);

The "Files" folder is not present in Apple Mail if you set the account type as IMAP instead of Exchange;

The "Files" folder cannot be deleted "distinguished folders cannot be deleted";

The messages in the "Files" folder seem to be created whenever an email with an attachment is sent or received to or from an external email address;
The messages in the "Files" folder correspond to genuine emails but are marked "no sender". Subject and timestamp matches a message in either the sent folder or the inbox;
The messages in the "Files" folder may contain text as the message body taken from the attachment that was in the corresponding original message. Attachments without text will be blank save for subject and timestamp;

There will be one 'no sender' message in the "Files folder for each attachment;

My theory is that "Files" is a backend Exchange system folder used to store or organise attachments and for some reason Apple Mail's implementation of the Exchange protocols is now causing it to show up when it should be invisible to the user.

Microsoft say they are looking into it and will talk to Apple if they confirm the issue to be with Mail.

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Answer 5

Aug 18, 2016 8:14 AM in response to Waragainstsleep

Thanks War for the detailed write up. I tried to be brief in my original post but appreciate the depth here as it will help others find this thread irritated by folders appearance.

As I suspected, just turning off Clutter in my 365 preferences did nothing to have either "Files" or "Clutter" folder from being removed or becoming distinguished.

I'm curious if there are any benefits/consequences to going IMAP protocol vs. Exchange.

If they weren't already looking in to it, thanks for helping get it on MS's radar to be looked at.

OH, and just a thought. Maybe theres a "leap year" bug in there. There are 366 days this year after all. (just a little MS poke there)

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Answer 6

Sep 5, 2016 2:24 AM in response to commanderclif_me

I can confirm this is happening when selecting the "Exchange" protocol.

Also when in an iPad or iPhone, even with Exchange, this folder does not appear.

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Answer 7

Sep 5, 2016 10:48 AM in response to skoussouris

Partially correct skoussouris. The folder "files" does not show up nor does the new "Yammer Root" folder showing up on Macs, but "Conversation History" and "Clutter" are showing up on iOS.

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Answer 8

Sep 5, 2016 11:00 AM in response to commanderclif_me

Not really, I see all the three of them

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Answer 9

Sep 5, 2016 11:06 AM in response to skoussouris

You said in your first post that the folder doesn't show up in iOS, without identifying which folder. To clarify:

OS X: Clutter, Conversation History, Files and the new one, Yammer Root all show.

iOS: Clutter and Conversation History show up.

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Answer 10

Sep 5, 2016 11:07 AM in response to commanderclif_me

You are correct, my mistake!

Btw I don't see the Yammer in OS X (maybe because I have never activated/used it)

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Answer 11

Sep 5, 2016 11:10 AM in response to skoussouris

NP! We were surprised to see it show up. And anything with the word "root" in it would normally mean you should be suspicious of what ROOT are we talking about?! So after a moment of panic, I figured out that Yammer is Microsofts version of "Slack" so how it got activated when my team had not expressed in interest in using it is beyond me. My suspicion was like "Clutter" this is just Microsoft pushing services on users without them asking for them first. Typical MS.

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Answer 12

edwward

Level 1

11 points

Oct 26, 2016 5:00 AM in response to commanderclif_me

I haven't been able to disable the folder, but I think I found a workaround for the way it borks search results.

Search in Mail is mediated by Spotlight, so I went into spotlight preferences and clicked Privacy

Then I used Finder's "Go to Folder" to open ~/Library and navigated to Mail/V3/ and at the top there was a load of folders with long letter/number names. Each one corresponds to one mail account, each contains lots of .mbox files, and each of those has the name of a folder.

I found the one called Files.mbox and dragged it onto the "Prevent Spotlight from searching these locations:" pane in Spotlight preferences.

This seems to have disabled searching in Files, and Mail search is functional again. Hurrah!

Screenshots:

Finder:

Spotlight preferences:

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Answer 13

Oct 28, 2016 8:57 AM in response to edwward

I had been meaning to come back to this thread to post that magically "Files" just disappeared. I still have "Clutter" and "Conversation History" that I'd LOVE to delete but thats gonna take Microsoft making a change to un-distiguish those.

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Answer 14

Nov 1, 2016 6:31 AM in response to commanderclif_me

I am not sure but I think this is resolved in macOS Sierra, at least I cannot see the 'Files' folder in macOS sierra. Can someone confirm this?

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Answer 15

Nov 18, 2016 3:12 AM in response to commanderclif_me

Any News? It's very annoying... I have a lot of problems with search and smart folder whit this useless messages

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