[MlMt] MailMate doesn’t seem to purge deleted/moved messages from the IMAP server

[Jolin Warren]

On 13 Jul 2025, at 0:44, Randall Gellens wrote:
> On 12 Jul 2025, at 5:37, Jolin Warren wrote:
>> On 10 Jul 2025, at 1:09, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:
>>> On 8 Jul 2025, at 12:41, Jolin Warren wrote:
>>>
>>>> It feels like MailMate is somehow flagging messages I remove from my Inbox but not actually asking the server to delete them. So MailMate ‘knows’ not to show them but all other mail clients still see and display the messages. It makes trying to work with email on my phone nearly impossible.
>>>
>>> This should only happen if you have one or more offline mailboxes within the account. Check the account under Sources in the mailbox list and make sure no mailboxes are greyed out.
>>
>> That’s good to know regarding offline mailboxes, but I’ve checked the account where I’m having this issue and every single mailbox is online, I can’t find any offline or sync issues.
>
> To help track down what is happening, I'd suggest keeping the Activity Viewer window open and in view, wait until MailMate is idle (nothing going on in the Activity Viewer), then move a message from one mailbox to another. You should see in the Activity Viewer that MailMate is connecting to the server and issuing commands to select the mailbox, copy the message, then mark the message for deletion and then expunge the message.

Randall, thank you so much for this suggestion! I finally had some time to do this today and what became clear very quickly is that deleted messages were being expunged but moved messages weren’t. This led me to find that the account I archive all my mail messages to was not working properly. It’s an IMAP server I run and an upgrade to the software early in the year had led to configuration issues which I hadn’t noticed until now. It took a while to sort out, but once I did all my messages are being properly moved and expunged.

Thanks so much, I will remember to use the Activity Viewer in the future to debug. And apologies to Benny for the initial poor diagnosis on my part. I’d only checked the account I was moving messages _from_, not the one I was moving _to_ which turned out to be the issue. Once the receiving account was back up, MailMate did the right thing (how could I have ever doubted?!).