Mail: Mark deleted emails as read in Trash

Question

Mail: Mark deleted emails as read in Trash

When on my iPhone when I swipe delete inbox emails in Mac Mail without opening them, when I go on my Mac about half of those messages are marked read and about half are shown as unread with the blue dot and message count. I have no interest in a message count on my trash can.

There is an older Community post here: Automatically mark messages as read in Tr… - Apple Community

Years ago I used these steps to set up on one of my Macs to mark messages in the Trash as deleted and it still works. Now I would like to replicate this on another Mac that uses 3 emails accounts in the Mail app. Looking to get some advice from someone better at code than myself. Looking at the link above, would I set up 3 daemons, one for each account or can one be configured to do all three trash folders?

Posted on Nov 19, 2025 8:11 AM

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Answer 1

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6x6

Level 6

19,245 points

Nov 19, 2025 5:02 PM in response to commanderclif_me

You would only need to duplicate the line in the script for each account ("Account1", "Account2" and "Account3"):

on run {}

   tell application "Mail"
      
      set read status of every message of mailbox "Deleted Items" of account "Account1" to true
      set read status of every message of mailbox "Deleted Items" of account "Account2" to true
      set read status of every message of mailbox "Deleted Items" of account "Account3" to true

   end tell

end run

The rest of the discussion you linked would be absolutely the same.

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Answer 2

Nov 20, 2025 6:16 AM in response to 6x6

Thank you, and 100% correct. Actually figured that out when I tracked back to the script which I forgot I had setup for the 3 Spam folders so just had to add the 3 Trash folders and now it seems to be working great.

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