I recently updated my new Macintosh to the latest OS X operating system, codename El Capitan. That experience is something I’ll write about later. Until then, I’ll let you know how I completely deleted all my email.
The update went smooth and overall, I like the new OS X. It is so dern fast to start and restart. I don’t know what they’re doing internally, but it’s pretty cool.
Anyway.
Upon starting up the new version of the Mail program, it showed that I had over 12,000 unread messages. These dated back to 2010. That was not what I recalled from the day before.
My email archives go back to 1999. That’s when I first started using a Macintosh for gathering email. If you recall, that’s when using email in Windows was a terrifying experience.
For some reason, Microsoft felt it necessary to have certain email attachments open automatically. If you used Outlook Express on Windows 95 or Windows 98, you were destined to get your PC infected by some form of virus. Things were terrible back then, so I switched to Eudora on the PC instead of Outlook Express. Then, for even more security, I switched to Eudora on the Macintosh. I even collected the PC email viruses I obtained on my Mac in a special folder.
Rather than suffer from email bloat, every year I archive older messages. So on New Year’s Day 2015, I took all my email from 2014 and exported it. When I need to access that email, I simply search through the archives, which are formatted as plain text.
The problem with keeping 20 years of email in the email program itself is that eventually activity slows to a crawl. An email program is basically a database, and with tens of thousands of records and multiple megabytes of text. Using such a program would become unwieldy after a while.
Apparently, the OS X El Capitan upgrade pulled in old and ancient messages from all my various email accounts. This seemed odd to me, because those accounts should have been purged. In fact, my notion of an ideal update is that nothing is changed, including my email.
Given that I had 12,000 unread messages, the first thing I did was to mark them all as read. Unfortunately, that didn’t purge them from the Mail program’s inbox. So I started deleting messages, careful not to remove anything recent.
The problem was that Gmail messages kept coming back in from the Gmail server, even though they’d been marked “read.” So I went to Gmail on the web and purged everything. In the process, I accidentally zapped some correspondence I hadn’t yet replied to. So if you recently sent me a message or asked a question, I apologize for not getting back to you.
I’ll outline the rest of my Macintosh update ordeal in a later post. As a tease, my issue was raised to the highest level and the OS X team is evaluating the situation directly.
