I’m sure this has been answered more than once but I am not finding what I need. I have over 700 thousand(!) emails in my SPAM folder (on my Mac) that go back 3 years. Every time I try to delete some/part/all of them by either selecting and deleting by using the delete script it hangs up the computer/mail program or faults out. I’ve even tried selecting and deleting a single email and I get “1455317.emlx couldn’t be copied to “Messages” because an item with the same name already exists.”
Tried hunting for a plist file in the Library to trash and start over but couldn’t find anything?
Tried having the SPAM redirected to the JUNK folder and auto-delete out of there but crashes Mail
Tried looking at the failure in Console but greek to me…
MacOS 10.11.3 but has been happening for many variations of the mac os through many upgrades of spam sieve.
Mac Mail 9.2
I tried both methods of rebuilding the database and, after many hours, had a brand-new SPAM folder with all 700K messages. I tried the script again and it failed, then I tried just deleting about 50K of them and that seemed to work. I then tried another 50K and according to the Activity panel it was hung up on “Checking for New Messages” and was not moving the second 50K to the Trash folder so I de-activated all the Mail accounts to prevent the program from checking for new messages and tried the script again. Fail. I seem to be able to delete small quantities (a few K at a time but this will be more time than I can stand).
Maybe this is simply an issue that the Script and the Mail program can’t handle a SPAM folder almost 4GB in size? Any further thoughts?
That’s what it sounds like to me. Perhaps you could just delete the Spam mailbox itself. Then create a new one, making sure to update the SpamSieve rule to use it.