I discovered – too late – that deleting a conversation thread from the Inbox also deletes all the sent mail in that conversation from the Sent folder. This is not what I want. For me, sent mail should always remain in the Sent folder forever so that I can verify that I actually sent an email to somebody.
Is there a setting I can tweak to change this behavior?
It really depends on what you want to do.
To delete a conversation, select it, and click on the delete icon, toolbar button or keyboard Del key. That will delete the whole conversation, so all the messages in the conversation regardless of what folders they are in.
To delete only some messages in a conversation, expand the conversation thread, then select the message and delete it by clicking on the delete icon, toolbar button or keyboard Del key.
Or you can right-click in the body of the message you want to delete, and choose Delete. You will need to use that method if you have a Free license, because you won’t have the thread view,
If conversations don’t work for you, you can disable them using Menu > View > Conversations > DIsable Conversations.
Thanks. That’s very clear and helpful. Sounds like you’ve fielded this question before. 
For the record, this still isn’t the behavior I prefer. For me, the iOS Mail app does it correctly. It shows conversations as threads in the Inbox (if you enable that feature) but deleting such a conversation does not delete anything from the Sent folder. This clears your Inbox while leaving a record in the Sent folder. For me, that’s the ideal behavior.
I need to keep all sent mail for legal reasons. Deleting a conversation thread should not delete the sent mail from that thread – it should only delete the incoming messages, not the outgoing messages. (Hint: Most other mail clients work this way.)
Any chance of making this an option in an upcoming release? It really is a big deal at my company.
I have already explained this above.
Deleting a conversations does just that - deletes the conversation. If you don’t want to delete the conversation, don’t delete the conversation. Rather you can selectively delete only some messages if you don’t want to keep all of them.
Yes, you did. I understand, and I appreciate the quick replies.
My question was, do you think this behavior might change, or perhaps become an option?
In my experience, other mail clients that support conversation view allow the conversation to be deleted with one click (or one keypress) but keep whatever is in the sent folder. This seems to be their default (or only) behavior.
eM Client is the opposite. It doesn’t offer that behavior, even as an option. Unfortunately for me, it makes eM Client’s conversation view unworkable because I have to “un-thread” the conversation and then pick through the incoming messages and delete them one-by-one to avoid trashing any outgoing messages, then re-enable conversation view.
It’s not a bug; just an unwelcome feature.
