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Synchronizing (Outlook) e-Mails iPad and Mac

evennewerbie

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OK it was my fault in the first place for ignorance/indiscipline, for many years I never deleted an e-mail.

I got up to about 25,000 mails, then thought I should do something about it. (In fact I was advised to not update my Mac OS till I did). I deleted about 10,000. I don't want to do it indiscriminately, always want to be sure of not deleting anything I want to keep, so a bit slow.

I have though this situation - there remain 15,000 mails on my Mac but 17,000 on my I-pad. My best inference is that the two devices have communicated somewhat but not completely. I don't want to have to do the job twice. It has been much easier to delete on the Mac than the iPad - on the Mac I can highlight 300 posts, e.g. all those from one journal, and delete the block - I haven't found a way to delete more than one mail at a time on the iPad.

Stuff on the web about this is either above my head or out of date. (Or gives instructions about things that don't exist like a Tools Tab I don't think my Mac has.)

However I found on my Mac under Mail, Mailbox, the option 'Synchronise - hotmail, which sounds promising for what I am trying to do. Why don't I just try it? Because what will it do if it finds a mail in one box and not the other? Will it delete the unwanted one or will it restore it where it was deleted? I don't want to see any of those maybe 2,000 or more deleted mails again!

Maybe related, Bluetooth on one device recognises I have the other. Gives me an option to connect them somehow. Would putting them into this kind of communion be relevant to what I'm trying to do? If not what is it good for?
 
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evennewerbie

evennewerbie

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OK I wasn't trying it because I was afraid of consequences as explained.

Anyway, not getting any answers I actioned this Synchronise option anyway. It worked, I deleted blocks of posts on the Mac and soon they were deleted on the iPad. Without connecting them up in any way.

(In the course of it I got many messages: 'could not be moved to mailbox Trash' or '500 Messages could not be moved to the mailbox… The IMAP command 'UID copy' failed... server error... some messages no longer exist'.I think I can afford to only guess what that is about.)

Other people may have other systems – I have seen many web discussions where people have great difficulty with this synchronisation and have to go through complicated procedures they would never have thought of themselves to achieve it.

I still wonder what putting the two devices in connection via Bluetooth is useful for?
 
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twerppoet

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I havn’t had a Mac for a couple years, so I couldn’t check out what you were talking about. Also, Outlook is probably my least used mail app. I only use it for one low-volume account.

Still, I found your report interesting. Thanks.

As for connecting an iOS/iPadOS device and a Mac via bluetooth; I don’t think there is any reason to do so. AirDrop and Handoff features use Bluetooth as a divise discovery method, but all the heavy lifting is done via Wi-Fi. Apple devices don’t need to establish a formal (paired) Bluetooth. Nor do they need to join the same wi-fi network for those two features.

As far as Outlook, the only requirement should be that both devices have an internet connection. The actual syncing should be with the device and the account. You probably have to run the task on both devices to achieve a complete cleanup. I don’t see anyway Outlook on one device can force another to change its local Outlook files; but I could be wrong about that.

Anyway, I do have a new Mac on order. If the issue comes up again I’ll be able to experiment. The low-volume account’s history isn’t important, so I don’t have to worry about loosing anything important.
 
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evennewerbie

evennewerbie

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Strange - I'm sure I replied a few days ago. But now no trace of it.

I said it was working. By synchronising I removed posts deleted from Mac also from IPad.

But now this is not working. Sure,Seem to be several methods for removing posts, some of which work and some don't,Seem to be several methods for removing posts, some of which work and some don't, so I can never remember exactly what I did.

Usually what I do is get a block of posts selecting all posts from e.g. a particular travel agency, press the hotmail trashcan and put them in Hotmail's trash. Then I press "Erase deleted items">In Hotmail. Or else I drag and drop them into the Mac trashcan.I have just emptied that trash can.

The weird thing is I erase several hundred posts at least- yet I always seem to be left with the same number of posts in my system! After I've got rid of perhaps 150 I am still left with the same number almost of posts as I had before! Maybe two or three less. (Though at least there are now approximately the same number in my Mac as on my iPad).

I am having to spend too much time on what ought to be trivial. Though I've glimpsed on the web that others have difficulty and there are all sorts of weird and wonderful recommendations which all look to be a lot of trouble
 

LannyC

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As I bailed on Windows in 1992, I've never used Hotmail. What works for me is to have my several email addresses all forward automatically to a single Gmail IMAP account, to which I direct both my Mac and my iPad Mail.app clients for one-stop pickup. With IMAP, I think of all my mail as residing on the Google server, and my local clients are just access points, windows into the mail database.

When I delete a message on one machine, it disappears from the other within seconds. Only the most recent Inbox messages actually reside on the iPad, as while the headers of older ones appear, the bodies are apparently erased to save space...but if I need to read an old message it will be fetched back from the server in a couple of seconds. Gmail's spam filtering is also very effective, and it's easy to whitelist addresses to bypass the filter. A final bonus: Google's webmail works nicely if you're away from your own devices.
 

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