Apple Mail no longer suggesting folders in the "Move" field

[commanderclif]

I'm not sure if same situation, but I ran in to similar issue why using Sonoma Beta. I've had the "Move to...." icon in my toolbar in Mail for ever. Then after an update it had become a single unnamed folder icon that served as a drop down with no suggestion for a folder. I thought it was gone. However when I went in to customize toolbar, there are now TWO icons called move. My original Move to.. had become its own new menu bar icon while the original was now defaulting to the forced dropdown pick view. I hope that helps someone having a similar issue.

 

[Squiduser]

Oh wow, this was so helpful and it prompted me to join this forum so I could thank you! Now this is sorted for me and hopefully others! 👍🏼

 

[nacinla]

@nacinla - I created an account here at MacRumors, just to reply to you.

Thank you for all of your efforts in trying to resolve this.

I have been a Mac user for 30+ years. I have many many gigs of email across multiple Gmail/iCloud accounts, spanning almost 15 years.

That predictive mailbox feature was INCREDIBLE–when it worked. It worked for me for maybe the first 6-12 months after they rolled it out. Then it broke–I have no idea why–and it has never worked again. So, for the past 3-4 (or more?) years I keep checking the web to see if anyone has figured it out.

Rules are not the answer for me. I would need 100+ rules to tame my mailboxes.

So, I keep using the dropdown or right-click "move to" command and scroll through my hundreds of mailboxes/folders. Time consuming and painful for a guy in his mid-fifties.

At this point, I'm assuming it'll never get resolved. Too few people saw the benefit to cause enough outrcy to get it attention.

But, thank you again for sticking to it.

Peace and Blessings

Just now seeing this message, so sorry for not responding sooner. Thanks for checking in! Sorry to hear you're having the same issue. Meanwhile, the third? fourth? anniversary of my first reporting this issue to Apple has passed. I'm on a new M3 using Sonoma; same issue. I've spoken to two more eager Apple phone reps and ... nothing. Nada. No solution.

 

[TerryJohn]

I have had the same issue for some time, as well.

It seems like a coding problem, because some emails, e.g., from Capital One VISA, K-of-C, and perhaps one other actually work every time. But the rest are missing the original predictive mail folder feature. I wish the Apple gurus would give us a fix. Like many have written here, it worked for a while, until it didn't.

And agreed, rules are not a good answer. So, it's double-tap, move to, and scroll to the proper mailbox and folder. Every day, every time, every message. PITA, indeed.

 

[MikeDr206]

Hopefully once Apple Intelligence is released this is a feature that will improve.

 

[Mr Ochie]

Thanks for documenting this! As a recent convert to Gmail, I'm going to agree that the Smart feature there is somehow involved in this behavior.

It has never failed me at home with my .Mac account, only here at work with my Gmail account in Mac Mail - which converted in June from an older IMAP provider.

Like many users I've relied on this for years and years. I've disabled the Gmail smart feature and looking forward to retraining Mac Mail. In my experience this won't take long, usually a couple emails will do the trick.

Looking forward to seeing if this was the fix!

 

[rlhamil]

I've had it work for me much of the time, break, and work again. Usually after some combination of a reboot, safe mode reboot, running sqlite3 "${HOME}/Library/Mail/V9/MailData/Envelope Index" vacuum # V9 varies according to macOS version, Spotlight re-index, etc. Some or all of those are best done/have to be done (the sqlite3 command) with Mail not running.

So at a minimum, I think one or more of those affects it.

I have multiple mail accounts, the one on my private IMAP server (which is running pretty old wu-imapd) in particular is on a slow but reliable 24 year old Sun Blade 100 running Solaris and has tens of thousands of emails (some with NNTP headers too) scattered over hundreds of mailboxes. A strange and demanding setup, in other words. Maybe a simpler setup (and updating that old server and moving the email to something faster - I have a plan but yuck!) would either have less problems or recover faster.

 

[SierraSam]

I recently transferred all my local email folders to Gmail. After that, all the predictive Move To functions stopped. I've made the changes to the Gmail smart functions as suggested here.

That said, why is there no search field for the move to function on MacOS? In iOS, if you swipe down, it appears at the top. While it's not predictive, at least you only have to type a few letters to navigate to your folder.