Why are sent emails not deleted when I delete a conversaion in Apple Mail?

According to the docs, when a conversion is deleted, "all of the messages in a conversation will be deleted".

Somehow, when I delete a conversation, sent emails are not deleted which creates orphans in the "Sent" folder.

What am I missing?

Solution 1:

These are two totally different entities.

The confusion comes in from a misunderstanding of how messaging works. It' helps to understand the concepts:

• Your Inbox are what you received via your incoming server
• "Conversations" is a collation of related messages you've received by your email client. There's no conversation the server is aware of.
• Sent Messages are messages that were transmitted via your outgoing server

What's important to know is that as far as your server is concerned, there's no such thing as a "conversation." There are just messages in folder (Inbox, Outbox, Sent, Junk, etc.).

"Deleting the conversation" is nothing more than a feature that was implemented to help organize your Inbox.