Many Draft emails appear later after composing emails-Mac Mail

[Dogbreath]

Intermittently, but frequently, I can compose an email in Mac Mail and it sends OK. Later, several "drafts" of the email shows up in Drafts folder with the email composed in steps...maybe 12 drafts with each one having maybe 4 or 5 words added to each one. It was doing this before I added SpamSieve, so SS is definitely not an issue. Any ideas, suggestions, remedies?!?!?!

Brent

all software is current...so are back ups

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Click CMD+, to get to the preferences, then go to Accounts and select the account that is having this problem. Click on Mailbox Behaviors tab and for the Drafts Mailbox option choose Drafts (on this Mac). That way Mac Mail will keep drafts locally otherwise it will end up making multiple drafts for consecutive saves..

This also should ensure that the drafts go away once the message has been sent..

 

[Dogbreath]

Thanks Ashwin . . . worked like a charm.

Brent

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Shweeet..

 

[IWT]

Ashwin, that's a great tip. I've messed about with Mail settings often enough - didn't know about that. I presume it's unique to IMAP accounts; not POP?

Anyway, big thanks.

Ian

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Ian, correct. This would only affect and help IMAP accounts since POP accounts are only pulling data from the server and not storing anything up there. Ideally, if this worked properly, you would be able to start an email on an IMAP account and have a draft saved on the server and pick it up from the web client or another computer connecting to the same account. In practice, however, Mac Mail routinely saves the ongoing draft and just creates multiple drafts for each save. Worse yet, once the message is sent, Mac Mail just erases the final draft and leaves the rest up there.

I ran into this when I switched to using Mac Mail as my client recently and thus having done the research, the solution was easy to regurgitate..

 

[Dogbreath]

It delights me that you can regurgitate so well. Very helpful in my case. My prayer is that that it doesn't lead to rumination syndrome. Thanks again, Ashwin.

 

[russp11]

Doesn't work for me! Any further ideas gratefully received.

Click CMD+, to get to the preferences, then go to Accounts and select the account that is having this problem. Click on Mailbox Behaviors tab and for the Drafts Mailbox option choose Drafts (on this Mac). That way Mac Mail will keep drafts locally otherwise it will end up making multiple drafts for consecutive saves..

This also should ensure that the drafts go away once the message has been sent..

I have identical problem I think, when I look back through Mac Mail - Archive, or when I do a search under "All" I can find sometimes up to 10 or more versions of same email, each with a few more words than the previous one. I have several gmail accounts and all of them are set to save Drafts into "On My Mac/Drafts" and that hasn't helped to stop the creation and storage of these drafts. All these multiple drafts are filling up my Archive folder, would love to get rid of them but not going to go through 20,000 emails line by line!