Mail Attempting to Sync Previous Recipients Despite Setting
Nonetheless, when I send an email in Mail app, from a non-iCloud account to an non-iCloud account, Mail immediately triggers an iCloud connection, as revealed by Little Snitch.
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What could Mail be querying and saving in CloudKit when I’ve disabled Mail in iCloud?
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As you can see in my screenshot at the beginning of this blog post, I have Contacts turned off in iCloud settings, so my Previous Recipients list should not be synced to iCloud. Nonetheless, I followed the commenter’s suggestion of logging in Terminal. I saw log messages that referred to
com.apple.mail.recents, which might indicate Previous Recipients and would certainly explain why this happens when I send an email.[…]
I do object to notifying Apple that I’ve just sent an email. That in itself seems like a violation of my privacy.
The settings are confusing, even more so than with System Preferences. If you go to System Settings ‣ Apple Account, it shows a round rect that says Mail and shows the Mail icon. If you click this, it lets you uncheck Sync this Mac for iCloud Mail. This mirrors the iCloud Mail checkbox that you get when you click See All to see the full list of apps. I don’t like how the top-level name and icon suggest that you’re going to a settings sheet for the Mail app, but then it actually gives you iCloud settings.
Importantly, there’s also another Mail checkbox in that list. It’s easy to miss because, first, why would you expect to see two Mail checkboxes?
And, second, it’s not obvious that there are actually three lists: a bunch of “favorite” system apps, in non-alphabetical order, for some reason including lesser ones like Freeform and Image Playground; followed by a second list of system apps in alphabetical order; and then a third list of alphabetical third-party apps.
Mail is in the second list, along with (to me) other top-tier apps like Books and Maps. Anyway, this second Mail checkbox controls the syncing of non-mail Mail data such as rules and smart mailboxes. But not, apparently, according to Apple, the previous recipients.
Previously:
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Yes, I think it's the second, app (not iCloud) Mail checkbox that controls recent recipient syncing. It's very ugly that Apple doesn't make clear what controls what and what gets synced, but I think I discovered that while trying to purge all the recent recipients from my iPhone and noting that the only option for mass deletion is in the Recent Recipients window on macOS.
