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Elijen

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 8, 2012
465
898
I have a mail account with lot of e-mails stored on server (around 100 thousand). I would like to clean it using Mail app and delete all unnecessary messages. But so far no luck :mad:

Store deleted e-mails on server is UNCHECKED.
Move deleted messages to Trash is UNCHECKED.

When I delete the messages they seem to disappear, but they appear again when I click on a different mailbox and back to the current one or when I restart the Mail app.

I have tried deleting all content of ~/Library/Mail/V2 folder and reimport all e-mails but it didn't help.

I have also tried to check the Move deleted messages to Trash, but then I am getting following error when exiting the Mail app:

Screen Shot 2012-11-18 at 2.07.01 PM.png

Also the Mail app seems to freeze when I try to exit. Or is it trying to delete the e-mails? I have tried to leave it open some hours but it didn't help neither.

Any suggestions?

P.S.: The account is connected using IMAP.
 

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,035
15,412
California
I would completely delete/remove the account from Mail app and start over so you are sure there are no corruption issues. Once you have the account setup properly in Mail, try to delete 200 or so at once to see how long that takes and you will get a feel for how long 100,000 will take. It could be that it will take hours.

Is there any way you could have a mail administrator or your ISP access the account and purge these at the server end for you?
 
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