02-28-2018, 03:46 AM
I had offered to try to help out a client with his Mac, and we went over some stuff today, mostly related to email. I have never seen anything like it. There were maybe a hundred local mailboxes, possibly more, most with sub folders, and some of the sub folders also had sub folders. The Mail app icon was showing over 31,000 unread messages. It appears to be about 12 years’ worth. He was having a problem with new sub folders not going inside the correct parent folder, and I could see that it wasn’t working, but had no clue why. He’s using Sierra, and I do most of my email in Mavericks or on my iOS devices. I’m amazed that Mail has not choked on this setup yet. The multitude of local mailboxes are specific in ways that I would never feel a need for. It reminded me of an office full of filing cabinets with all the drawers crammed completely full of file folders. He said some disappeared recently, but he got them back from Time Machine.
He is actually pretty Mac savvy, but I don’t think his email is fixable. We looked at some “unread” messages from 10 years ago, and I suggested just marking the old stuff as read to at least get rid of that distraction. He said he didn’t know if he had read these 2008 emails, so he was reluctant to mark them as read. But he also can’t sit and re-read 31,000+ messages to try to figure out if he has already read them.
Given the time frame, this stuff was probably migrated from at least two other Macs he has owned. I don’t think the answer is to keep creating mailboxes and sub folders for every little thing, but I don’t think I can convince him of that.
Not even sure that I have a question. I have no idea how he can get on top of this without wasting huge amounts of time that he should be spending on other things. About all I may have managed to do was suggest a way to trim down the annoying Archive folder that gmail insists on creating.
He is actually pretty Mac savvy, but I don’t think his email is fixable. We looked at some “unread” messages from 10 years ago, and I suggested just marking the old stuff as read to at least get rid of that distraction. He said he didn’t know if he had read these 2008 emails, so he was reluctant to mark them as read. But he also can’t sit and re-read 31,000+ messages to try to figure out if he has already read them.
Given the time frame, this stuff was probably migrated from at least two other Macs he has owned. I don’t think the answer is to keep creating mailboxes and sub folders for every little thing, but I don’t think I can convince him of that.
Not even sure that I have a question. I have no idea how he can get on top of this without wasting huge amounts of time that he should be spending on other things. About all I may have managed to do was suggest a way to trim down the annoying Archive folder that gmail insists on creating.