Mail.app not deleting messages from server

[bunner bob]

I had this problem a couple of months ago - suddenly I received several hundred emails. The strange thing was, I'd received these same emails (mostly junk) a week or so before. They were all dated within about a 5-day range, starting a week before and ending a couple of days before.

Then a month or so later, it happened again. Same several hundred emails, same dates (now 5 weeks ago, roughly).

I went to my webmail app and found all these messages were still on the server - they hadn't been deleted - even though I was using the default mail.app delete setting. I changed my setting to "delete immediately after receiving".

Nothing bad happened, but then today, randomly, I went on webmail again. I discovered about 30 messages from a week or so ago that hadn't been deleted.

I'm wondering why this could be. Could it be that something's hiccuping during a 'receive mail' cycle? I really have no clue. Anyone else experienced anything like this?

- Bob

 

[Cheryl]

mail is not following your commands.
Go to home>Library>Preferences. Trash the com.apple.mail.plist. Empty the trash, start up Mail. Set your options.

This should correct things.

 

[Giaguara]

which email provider do you use? i got over 5000 messages once with .mac so it looked like this (before force quitting)

i had as the main mac account another than on ichat (i still do) and somehow the system preferences changed it .. at one point my .mac accounts were switched, so 2 accounts were logging on with the same username and getting the same messages over and over. i don't know if this has happened with other than .mac accounts but might be worth checking if you have more than one account that the account details have not changed.