If you access your email via IMAP on Apple Mail (Mac OS X), it is possible you may come across one or more of these problems:

  • Mail you have deleted still appears in webmail or on another device, but marked as deleted or crossed out;
  • You continue to get messages from GreenNet about your mailbox filling, even after deleting or moving messages;
  • Large messages (with attachments) bounce back to the sender and are not received.

If you are having those problems, you may need to reconfigure Mail.app to expunge or "erase" deleted messages regularly.  (You might think "erase" and "delete" are synonymous, but not in the world of Apple Mail.)

Go to the 'Mail' menu, then 'Preferences', then choose 'Accounts' along the top bar.  Choose your GreenNet account, and then click the 'Mailbox behaviours' tab, and look at the bottom 'Trash' section.  (The chances are that you have 'Move deleted messages to the Trash' not ticked and 'Store deleted messages on the server' ticked. Even if you are moving mail to Trash you should set an erase option.) You should see an option "Permanently erase deleted messages when".  As Apple says, 'Select a setting other than Never to avoid exceeding storage limits set by your account provider.' 

  • If it is set to 'Quitting Mail', and you leave your computer permanently on and never close Mail, the server mailbox may continue to fill up.

We would suggest changing the option to 'One day old'.  If you do delete messages by accident and want to recover them immediately 'View' > 'Show Deleted Messages', then select the messages you want to un-delete and go to 'Edit' > 'Undelete'.  If it's older than a day (or if you choose not to 'Store deleted messages on the server'), we do keep backups of GreenNet email for a week.

You can erase the messages immediately, freeing up server space, by finding the menu item "Mailbox > Erase Deleted Items" and choosing your GreenNet IMAP account, or right-clicking (ctrl+clicking) on the inbox and choosing 'Erase Deleted Items'.  You would also get the "expunge" or "purge" effect if you log in to Squirrelmail and log out again. 

To summarise: a time limit on leaving deleted messages on the server is recommended for IMAP accounts on Apple Mail.