Spotlight resurrecting old emails. Learn how to prevent this.
source: http://www.tuaw.com/2009/08/18/prevent-spotlight-from-resurrecting-your-deleted-emails/
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- heimbachae
- added this
"Our friends over at Engadget have highlighted a Cult of Mac post that, at first glance, appears to have found a bug in Spotlight's caching of email search results on the iPhone. The idea is that after you delete an email from your inbox in the iPhone's Mail.app client, you can still locate and open the e-mail using Spotlight search, if you know the subject of the message.
What's really happening, though, is what Apple might otherwise call "user confusion." When you delete an e-mail message in most mail clients, the message isn't magically deleted, but instead moved to a "trash" or "deleted messages" folder. Being a folder, it is indexed by Mail to provide an unread count, as well as by Spotlight so that you can easily find messages in the folder. When you search for the email, it shows up in Spotlight and opens in Mail because the message still exists in your trash folder.
All right, so what can you do to avoid this? Well, you need to empty the trash folder from your email. With many providers, you can just go to the trash folder, and delete the message from there to permanently remove it. The problem there is that, if you use a service like Gmail, the message doesn't really get deleted when you do this because of the way Gmail translates its labels into folders. Gmail's Trash folder is also set to purge itself after 30 days by default."
The rest of the article can be found through the link. It's very interesting to read especially for all iPhone 3.0 and up users.
What's really happening, though, is what Apple might otherwise call "user confusion." When you delete an e-mail message in most mail clients, the message isn't magically deleted, but instead moved to a "trash" or "deleted messages" folder. Being a folder, it is indexed by Mail to provide an unread count, as well as by Spotlight so that you can easily find messages in the folder. When you search for the email, it shows up in Spotlight and opens in Mail because the message still exists in your trash folder.
All right, so what can you do to avoid this? Well, you need to empty the trash folder from your email. With many providers, you can just go to the trash folder, and delete the message from there to permanently remove it. The problem there is that, if you use a service like Gmail, the message doesn't really get deleted when you do this because of the way Gmail translates its labels into folders. Gmail's Trash folder is also set to purge itself after 30 days by default."
The rest of the article can be found through the link. It's very interesting to read especially for all iPhone 3.0 and up users.
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- tags:
- iPhone, Apple Computers, iPhone 3G, IPhone 3GS, 3 more
