You need to select the 'Save Changes' button at the bottom for this to take effect. (I have my system set up to 'Move the message to the Trash' and rely on the 30 days mentioned above) Check 'Immediately delete the message forever'.Check 'Auto-Expunge off - Wait for the client to update the server.'įor 'When a message is marked as deleted and expunged from the last visible IMAP folder'.

I do, however, have things set so that email does get put into the trash properly on the Gmail side of things, and it looks like there are settings available to delete things immediately, and it works on my system in the way I want it too.Īt, log in to your account and select the following:įor 'When I mark a message in IMAP as deleted' The way the system works seems to be the same using either a 'regular' account or a 'Google Apps for Domains' account. Note that as of May 2020 I am still using the same setup in systems up to and including Mojave, but have not done any testing of Catalina. I have not tested ALL of these settings (I mostly rely on the '30 days in the trash' feature of Gmail to empty things: ) and I have only recently updated to 'El Capitan', but things do not seem any different from my Yosemite, Mavericks and earlier experiences. The 'fix' is to setup Gmail to not show the messages in multiple IMAP folders (by turning off the 'All Mail' folder) and to also have the Gmail servers 'expunge' the message when the Mail.app tells it so rather than doing it 'automatically', even though that (default) setting on the Gmail server seems to imply that the 'auto' setting would be what was desired. Thus, when Mail.app tells the Gmail server to delete a message from the Inbox, the Gmail server cannot reliably tell if it should just remove the 'Inbox' label from that message (leaving it with one fewer label, possibly still having other labels, or maybe no label but still available in the 'All Mail' view) or if it should more permanently remove the message completely from the database. The challenge is that Gmail uses 'Labels' to attach to messages, and messages can have zero or more than one label, while IMAP puts messages in folders (Inbox, Trash, etc) and every message is in one, and only one, folder.

Apple mail preferences blank mojave