#2699 accepted
CARL MASON

accidently moved inbox to Deleted Messages; undo hung machine

Reported by CARL MASON | November 30th, 2020 @ 05:25 PM

Hi mailMate --

I am a new user so perhaps this is obvious... I unintentionally hit command A to select what I intended to be everything from a particular sender, then hit trashcan icon. Somehow it turned out that all 48,000 messages in my inbox were selected and they were moved to the Deleted Messages (mailbox?). This is not ideal. I immediately found the undo button and undid the 48,000 deletions... except it did not work out. mailMate stopped responding and after waiting a hour, I force quit. On reopening the nightmare continues. I cannot figure out how to move those messages back into the inbox -- or anywhere safe.

Thanks

--Carl

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • benny

    benny December 1st, 2020 @ 03:47 PM

    • State changed from “new” to “accepted”

    Sorry about the late reply.

    First of all, make sure you have a backup of the Messages folder in MailMate:

    /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Messages
    

    (It might be located elsewhere if you have used the “Custom Location” feature in the General preferences pane of MailMate.)

    That folder contains all of your emails no matter if they are in the Inbox or in Deleted Messages.

    So, right now, MailMate is hanging after launch if I understand correctly? It's a bit strange that “undo” made it hang because undoing is essentially the same as your initial action, that is, moving 48000 messages, but then again 48000 is a lot to handle in one action and it might trigger performance issues.

    If you use a different email client (or webmail), do you then see the messages in the Inbox or in Deleted Messages? If the change hasn't synchronized with the server then it might be easier to simply reset everything in MailMate and let it re-download emails instead. I'll tell you how to do this.

    I'll note this ticket as a request for some kind of warning when moving a large number of emails (by accident or not).

  • CARL MASON

    CARL MASON December 1st, 2020 @ 07:49 PM

    Thanks for your reply. I was able select all the messages in the “Deleted Messages” mailbox and move them to the “Archive” mailbox which is reasonable outcome. I am not proud of having 48000 messages in my inbox. Curiously the move from Inbox to Deleted Messages was essentially instantaneous, but moving from Deleted Messages to Archive took over an hour. I suspect that un-doing the original accidental move to Deleted Messages would have worked, but I panicked after several minutes of non-responsiveness.

    An “are you sure you want to delete/move 48,000 messages” popup box would be an excellent guard rail at least for new users. It is great to be able to make large changes with few keystrokes, but it is also like a circular saw with the safety guards removed… a bit dangerous.

    It is good to know about where to find and copy all the downloaded emails. The situation has resolved itself so I won’t need to delete and re-sync — but also nice to know that option exists.

    Thanks
    —Carl

Please Sign in or create a free account to add a new ticket.

With your very own profile, you can contribute to projects, track your activity, watch tickets, receive and update tickets through your email and much more.

New-ticket Create new ticket

Create your profile

Help contribute to this project by taking a few moments to create your personal profile. Create your profile ยป

Mac OS X email client.

Shared Ticket Bins

People watching this ticket

Pages