Gmail = beware

On December 5 I got a brand new MacBook Pro and set it up by pulling everything in from TM on my external Drive.

All was well

Left the USA on December 9th .

Got home and have happily been using said MBP until Sunday evening when to my utter horror up flashed a warning that my Start up Disk was almost full and I should start deleting files off it !!

How the blazes did this happen. Thought I was dreaming so ignored it , till it popped up again . Looked at my HD , Got info and found I had but 1.2 GB free !!!

Couldn't see what this was / how it had happened / started to panic . Shut down MBP

Finally got into Apple yesterday - Genius bar appt was for 11 am but we started at 10.45 . Nice guy too . He started checking everything out and found that whatever it was that had given problems was in my Libraries - so started to dig in there and found it was in my E-mails !!

Google showed up with THOUSANDS of recovered e-mails - literally thousands

Oddly they were all duplicates of the very last one I had sent before leaving the USA - note I had sent

They didn't half take some shifting - as fast as he was removing them they were replicating - I'm not kidding ! Eventually we just de-activated G-mail and were then able to remove all these darn 'recovered files ' . As soon as we had done that my HD was back to just over 59 GB in use .

Genius commented that he had never seen this before and suggested that I did not run Gmail under IMAP again - use only on the Web for safety .

I have now de-activated it on the other Laptop as well.

Both machines have been 'swept' and appear to be free of any nasties .

How did this happen - we have no idea whatsoever - but believe you me - it happened and I don't ever want that happening again - seeing e-mails replicating themselves while you are trying to remove them is NOT funny .

You didn't E-Mail to China did you?

twas only from the USA to the UK

Yeah - had wondered about the Chinese effect

The Genius told you not to use Gmail IMAP? Sorry, but that's just lame. It's most likely the Mail.app application had a fit, and could probably easily be solved by removing and creating the account again.

Have you got any 3rd party plugins runnings or something which manages Spam, such as Anti-Virus, etc?

I'm going to be on the 'It works for me' side of the fence. No problems and have been using Gmail and the Mail.app together for the last 4 years.

Edited by deleted (Thu 21-Jan-10 19:47:05)

I also had this problem a while back, it was something to do with Gmail pulling in my entire 10,000 message inbox from Windows Live Mail. For some reason I would get duplicates in my inbox on Mail.app but not on Gmail. I didn't lose that amount of space like you did but hey.

In reply to a post by goldenoldie:

twas only from the USA to the UK

Yeah - had wondered about the Chinese effect

Must be an apple issue, I use gmail on both my windows & Linux machines - no issue's (not within the past 2 years - Also 1 of the few people in the UK to have a gmail account - not googlemail)

I have one account originally set up as gmail, and one as googlemail, but have always used both with a gmail.com suffix - it works fine for both.

I too have had weird duplicates when using IMAP/GMail. (Well Sky email actually but it's the sane thing)

I've never had it eat my HD though - sounds scary!

Strangely, the dupes would be successive copies of a long email with each copy showing a bit more of the composed final. Does that make sense?

I have now converted the offending account to POP, I had no real need for IMAP anyway, I was just being curious.

t t

Strangely enough - I've not yet de-activated it on the other MBP - and it's had no problems at all .

It's been a very weird and worrying situation

Could it be a rule that was corrupted when the TM backup was put on your computer then?

MacFriar

I dunno - and I don't think we'll ever know .

After all the early ones in the USA were all OK - it was only one from the last day that caused the problems.

The Genius went through everything and couldn't find any obvious errors anywhere , all my rules were checked , all my settings were checked

A tad worrying indeed but what a godsend it is to have access to the Genius bar. Non apple folks eat your heart out.

Out of curiosity, did the 'Genius' take a look at the console log? This may have revealed the problem.

No - he didn't

In reply to a post by lenaspell:

A tad worrying indeed but what a godsend it is to have access to the Genius bar. Non apple folks eat your heart out.

lol been following this thread, never ever had the above issue with gmail ?? I thought genuis was some sort of program on a Mac that told you what the problem was

Might be worth a try next time you go in.

MrGrumpy - Nope they are the friendly and usually excellent guys and gals in a special section of the Apple Stores all around the world. The best one I have ever used resided at the store in Boston.

@ Wellard and lenaspell

Console is a closed book to me - but I did have a look and there are some very strange entries in it - yup - another visit to Apple is indicated and I'll try and get Scott again .

Thanks for that suggestion .

I've been using gmail for years without a problem.
This sounds like a mac problem rather than a gmail problem so I would be careful about blaming gmail for something that may be a programming error in mail.

Did you use the "recent:" prefix for your pop name in the mail program

see

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=...

this can cause a lot of mail to be downloaded