Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking Sent email gone missing from Sent Folder

From my computer, I sent an email to my wife. It arrived on her iPad, but not her computer. Quite odd says moi. But what really baffles me is that it does not appear in either the Sent Folder of my computer or my iPhone.

Rebuilding my Mailbox brought no joy.

Might this be an AOL server issue?

I can't comment on AOL from my personal experience, but I've recently been experiencing a much-reported bug in Mavericks' Mail.app handling of Gmail (one of many such bugs, unfortunately).

Occasionally, Mail.app loses contact with Gmail's mailboxes, including the Inbox and the Sent mailbox. Here's Apple's recommended workaround: New email messages not received... (Note the sly implication that the fault lies with "some email providers," even though the problem only surfaced with Mavericks.)

I don't know if this technique will solve your problem, but it's worth a try.

To be fair, Apple might not be far off the mark in blaming "some email providers." Google's implementation of IMAP in Gmail is...well, I'd call it "really weird," but the phrase I keep seeing in the programming community is "highly nonstandard." Google actually maintains a Web page of "IMAP features not supported in Gmail," but even the features they do support don't adhere to the published IMAP standard.

The problem isn't just with Mail. Thunderbird, Opera, and Outlook have trouble with Gmail via IMAP, too. There are technical documents all over the Internettubes about Google's broken IMAP implementation. In particular, Gmail's implementation of the "read mail" flag is inconsistent and buggy, Gmail's message-state and parent folder properties aren't properly passed to an IMAP client, it sends state changes to the client every five minutes even if no message states have changed (which violates the IMAP standard), it only consistently reports message states after a current IMAP session expires and is refreshed...the list goes on.

Google's broken IMAP implementation is a source of frustration for every mail developer and Internet programmer out there. All the mail clients need special code just to handle the weird things Google has done to IMAP. And they're tinkering with it all the time, so hacks and workarounds that get around its brokenness might work today and fail tomorrow. It's actually embarrassing that a company like Google can't implement a well-documented specification like IMAP.

Everything seems to be normal again, though I suppose I'll never know what happened or in which universe my lost email now resides. Maybe I should query the NSA...

I suppose I would be more comfortable if the issue involved Gmail or one that others were experiencing. Over the years, I have had delays of a few hours, duplicates, sent items remaining in the Draft Folder, rules that don't work, corrupt attachments, and other odd ball problems. But this is the first time I have had a sent message not be in the Sent Folder. I even went directly to my AOL account via the Internet and accessed my account that way. And the lost email is not there either.

Can it be there are mysteries of life that are beyond me? Nah...

Of course, thanks gents, for sharing your time & insight; 'tis appreciated.

Google's non-standard and constantly changing IMAP comes across as intended to discourage the use of an email client and encourage the use of Google's webmail interface That way, Google gets the traffic count and can charge their advertisers accordingly.

Yahoo takes a straight-forward tack of offering free email only through their webmail server. If you want to use the email client on your computer, you have to pay for the privilege.