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Phantom emails

Avatar David Whitton
They started arriving on the 4th or 5th July.
We have four machines that access two mail boxes (me and BT). They have worked well as long as there are clear rules about deleting.
You can read messages by individual mailbox or by all mailboxes. On the iPad - but not the other machines - if you click All Mailboxes you get the BT mail but not the me mail. But you do get messages that say 'this message has no content' or 'No Sender' and they have various dates going back to 01/01/1970.
I cannot delete them as if you try they say 'this message has no content
so can someone tell me
- How do I delete the Phantoms and How do I get the me.com messages.
and I know there are discussions in the government again about UFO's but I haven't seen any!

Re: Phantom emails

Avatar Gordon Clyne
phantoms are often caused by having a mailbox that has several accounts, some are Imap, and some are pop. Lets have the following scenario
A Mac - and Ipad and an iPhone each with the mail app running, and each having a unified inbox with threading on or off doesn't matter. and an iCloud account, (Imap- apple) an Imap account (gmail) and a couple of POP accounts, like BTinternet or cheapo_email.co.uk.... you get the idea.

when you delete a pop email from one of the aggregated inboxes, the sync information of rthe aggregated inboxes is shared by the iCloud and also the Gmail Imap services. NOW... this is a very complex thing, and when you delete a pop email, it can leave a ghost in the sync, which is what you are seeing with "no content"

we rarely quit our mail apps on our mobile devices, but those same mobile devices don't always remove the deleted trash because its a pop account and they are not sure what state its in. if you quit and restart the ghosts will disappear, but the only reason they are ghosts is because you have already read it on another device, its just that POP can't tell, and update the other clients you use.

basically POP sucks, manual deletion is your only hope Obiwan, but if your POP service has an IMAP upgrade, GET IT!!....
 
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