Email POP nightmare

[cosmichobo]

G'day,

I'm setting up my father's new M1 iMac. Used his Time Machine backup from his old 2008 Mavericks iMac to copy over everything. All good.

Open Mail... and - it's downloading 18,000 emails - which is 5 odd years worth of emails that were still on his ISP's mail server.

What's the best way for me to "sync" to his old iMac? He very much does not want to sort through 18,000 emails...

Thanks

cosmic

 

[Slartibart]

configuring the email account as IMAP isn’t an option?

 

[cosmichobo]

Hi …fast,

May well be time to change him over… but I still need to get what’s on his new iMac to look like what was on the old one - ie about 2,000 emails, not 18,000… and not sure how…

 

[Slartibart]

which email client? where is the email account configured as POP provided?

In general you should be able to logon to a webmail account using a browser and move all older mail out of Inbox into other folders. Then when you create new pop mail account on new computer, it will only download whatever is in the server Inbox.

 

[cosmichobo]

Apple Mail.

When I looked at dad's webmail account (It's Telstra, Australia's dominant ISP), there were emails going back for YEARS AND YEARS on there... I deleted a heap of them a few months ago as he'd hit the 1GB limit, but I couldn't find a way to bulk-delete them - I could only delete 50 at a time... and there's 18,000...

At this point... What's the best way to get the new iMac - which has now downloaded all 18,000 emails... to go back to only having the 2,000 or so that he had kept over the years?

 

[Slartibart]

Create a new mailbox outside your inbox (!!!make sure it is NOT a smart mailbox!!!).

Search your mails for important emails in e.g. a time frame or range of dates.

Select all mails from the search results (“Edit->Select All”) and drag them into the new mailbox you just created.

Make sure to have all of our important emails stored in a separate mailbox outside the inbox, so that they aren’t deleted by any further bulk-action.

Then follow this guide to delete all the remaining mails from the inbox.

 

[cosmichobo]

I'm thinking.... If I go into my father's webmail, and delete the 18k mails... then do a fresh instal from the Time Machine drive... it wont have all those emails to retrieve and clog up his inbox.

The thing is - there's no simple way to bulk delete the emails that are now in his Inbox in the Mail app. He may have received 90% junk from Person X, but want to keep 10 random emails over the past X years... So - he'd have to go through them all to find the ones he wants.

 

[smirking]

This happens a lot with POP email when you move to a new computer or new program. It loses track of what's downloaded or not.

POP email will re-download anything that's on the server if the local mail program doesn't know that it already has a copy of that email. If you migrated using Time Machine, then your dad should have all of the emails he already wants up to a specific date. To prevent those 18000 emails from downloading, there's probably a webmail service associated with that mail account you can login to. Use that to delete all of his emails up to a certain date.

If he doesn't have a webmail provider, you can do the same by using another mail program to access his POP mailbox as an IMAP mailbox. It'll now behave just like Webmail. Anything you delete will actually be purged so delete away and remember to empty the trash.

Since your Dad's normal email is a POP Mail account, what he's already downloaded won't be affected because with POP, nothing syncs. It's either there or it isn't.

 

[cosmichobo]

This happens a lot with POP email when you move to a new computer or new program. It loses track of what's downloaded or not.

Have to say - I was not anticipating this problem...

I am currently deleting 25 emails at a time using his webmail login, as Telstra's stupid system falls over itself if I try to do more. I'll delete everything up til 1/12/21. And yes - I figure we have all his "desired" emails on both his old iMac, and on the Time Machine backup.

Once I finish deleting the emails in Webmail... Is there a way to use the Time Machine backup to "restore" Mail to how it was yesterday? At the moment, Mail (on the new iMac) has all 18,000 emails...

I am trying to avoid simply resetting the whole computer and re-installing the entire Time Machine backup... though if I have to - that's what I'll do. It "only" took 2 hours... Thing is - I'm on a tight time frame - I live 5 hrs away - am here today, and then til lunch time tomorrow... (it's 9am today here in Aus...)

 

[smirking]

Once I finish deleting the emails in Webmail... Is there a way to use the Time Machine backup to "restore" Mail to how it was yesterday? At the moment, Mail (on the new iMac) has all 18,000 emails...

You should be able to run a restore on the Mail folder that's located at:
/Users/<username>/Library/Mail/V9

That's if he's on Monterey. An earlier OS would have a different version number so it might be V8.

Inside that folder will be a bunch of folders with mailbox files in it. Just restore that entire V9 folder. If you inspect some of the mailbox folders inside and open text files, you'll find that they are the actual copies of emails that have arrived. Each email is its own file.

 

[cosmichobo]

Thanks for the further info, @smirking

I just tried using the "Restore" option - thinking to reinstall Big Sur (which came on the computer) and then do a fresh migration of the whole computer... But instead - everything is exactly as it was... didn't wipe the user account etc.

So - I'll have a look at your info above in a bit - have a pissed off wife and kids wanting to go for a swim.

 

[cosmichobo]

Thanks to everyone for your help above.

I ended up setting up a new user account, and re-importing the Time Machine data -- After first deleting all of the emails on the server (except the past couple of days as a buffer).

Problem solved for now.... and I'll re-investigate getting the Apple Mail app to delete the messages off the server after 30 days again. I'm sure that's how it used to work.

 

[Ruggy]

What you could do is use 'rules'.
You go into mail> preferences and you find rules there.
So for example you mention hundreds of junk mail from one user so you set up a rule which automatically deletes all the mail from that one user.
You could also set up rules to search for certain words in the subject line like 'newsletter' and you could delete them, or create a new mailbox and put them into that automatically.
Plenty of options to play with which will help.


If you want to delete off the server after 30 days go mail>preferences> accounts then find the relevant email address followed by 'mailbox behaviour' tab and you'll see the options there

But you can also use rules to put messages into the junk mailbox and they will be deleted according to the settings you use there.