88 MACWORLD FEBRUARY 2020
WORKINGMAC ENSURE SENT EMAIL IS COPIED TO RIGHT LOCATION IN MAIL- Select Mail → Preferences and click
Accounts. - Choose a mail account in the list at
left and click the Mailbox Behaviors button. - The Sent Mailbox popup menu
lets you select among various
mailboxes, but note that you can store it
in a mailbox associated with the
account (at top) or in a local Sent folder
under the On My Mac label.
In iOS, you have to drill down a bit
farther: - Open Settings → Passwords &
Accounts and tap the email account. (It
can’t be the iCloud account, as it won’t let
you choose email storage locations in iOS.) - Tap Account → Advanced → Sent
Mailbox. (Not all mail hosts let you select
this in iOS, such as Gmail, even if it
appears as an option in Mail for macOS!) - In this list, you can again pick from
choices on the server or under On My
iPhone, the Sent mailbox.
If you pick the local mailbox (On My
Mac, On My iPhone, or On My iPad), you
might think your sent email wasn’t retained
if you search from any of your other devices
or use a web email interface to check mail.
You can only find sent messages stored to
a single device on that device, naturally; to
keep a record of a message accessible
from every device and via a web app you
have to leave it on the server.
Some email hosting services
separately let you control the behavior of
whether sent email is retained when you
use a web app. That can result in a
problem where sent messages are moved
to a Sent mailbox and then deleted by the
mail host, either immediately or after a set
number of days. For services other than
iCloud and Gmail, check the settings at the
mail host directly to ensure you won’t find
those messages missing in the future.
As one more piece of belt-and-
suspenders backups of my messages, I
have a folder on my Mac to which I copy
(but do not move) Sent email from my
various accounts. This gives me a local
backup in case there’s a server problem
or I accidentally delete sent email from
the server.
Now about those crew duplicates:
“Scotty, don’t beam me down!” ■The Sent Mailbox can be set to a server
location or stored locally on a Mac.