Zombie emails keep coming back...

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Apr 20, 2015
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I have a problem with Mail that's baffling me.

I tried a rebuild on the sent box of a POP3 account in mac Mail. Although I manually delete mails over a year old on a regular basis, when I started the rebuild, the sent mailbox began to fill up with much older mails, dating back to 2010.

This used up a whopping 45GB on my HD.

I've tried deleting these mails, dumping them in batches into the Mail trash then emptying the trash, but they keep coming back like zombies.

In Mail preferences > accounts > advanced, I have it set to remove copies from the server after one week. This appears to apply to incoming mail. I rebuilt the inbox without any problem.

In preferences > accounts > mailbox behaviours, I have 'Delete sent messages' set to 'Never'. I had assumed this refers to the mailbox on my HD, from which I prefer to delete manually.

On checking my 'sent' mailbox on the server via a webmail client I find there are only a couple of hundred mails, so they don't appear to be accumulating there.

Where is Mail getting all these old mails from when I ask it to rebuild?

Why does it keep replacing the ones I delete?

Any help in explaining this would be hugely appreciated. My HD is stuffed and I can't work on anything else until I get this cleared up.
 

dbm


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Dec 31, 2010
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Your Mac's Specs
Mac Mini 2011 i5 2.3/8GB, MBPr 15 2013 with i7/16GB both running El Capitan
I've had similar strange behaviour when I wrongly configured a POP3 account as IMAP. This is the first thing I would check on the account settings.
 

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