The destination mailbox “Deleted Messages — email@usa.net” does not allow mess

davl

Registered
When I go into Mail -> preferences -> Mailbox Behaviors and check the "move deleted messages to a separate folder" box, I get this message when I attempt to delete messages in my inbox:

The destination mailbox “Deleted Messages — email@usa.net” does not allow messages to be moved to it.

Note it's not a .mac email account.

When I uncheck that box. It leaves the deleted messages in my inbox, grayed out. And I have to permanently remove delete messages to get rid of them.

Does anyone know how to just make Mail delete messages to the Trash folder and leave them there?

Thanks for any help.
 
I figured this out poking around in the directories and sorting out a little about how Mail works. Posting the solution in case someone else goes searching. Apparently this hasn't happened to many users.

In finder I opened the folder containing the mailbox folders of my POP account. It was located at:

My User Home Folder --> Library --> Mail --> POP/account name --> additional POP folder

In this folder were the mailboxes folders with .mbox extensions.

Deleted Messages --> empty
Drafts.mbox --> Messages
INBOX.mbox --> Messages
Sent Messages.mbox --> Messages

Note my Deleted Messages doesn't have a .mbox extension like the others do. After some playing around with the folders and options I tried just renaming the folder Deleted Messages to Deleted Messages.mbox. Rebuilt the mailboxes (Mailbox --> Rebuild) and it works now. Make sure that Mail -> Preferences --> Accounts --> Mailbox Behaviors has the "Move deleted messages to a separate folder" box checked too.
 
Well davl what a geek way of answering your own question.:eek: Thanks for letting us know the answer.:)
 
I had the same problem but the method above didn't work for me. In my case what worked was deleting the trash > account name subfolder

To clarify I removed the mailbox with the same name as in the error message. The mailbox is a subfolder of Trash you can see it by clicking on the small back triangle to the left of the Trash folder name.

I removed it from within Mail just using "Delete Mailbox". Mail then just seems to spawn another folder in the same place as described above with the same name and a .mbox extension and now it just works again,

Then the Mail program recreated it and all is now well

Thanks for your great post that got me started. I hope mine might help someone as well.

Regards
Nick Sibbing
Artful - web, print, design
1300 278 385
 
Last edited:
I have not been able to see my deleted messages from my other PoP account for ever. Thank you very much for your advice. It worked, like right now.

All the best!
 
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