A fix for “The IMAP Hang” or just lucky?
Apple’s Tiger Mail Discussion Board contains a few threads from people with IMAP problems in Mail, mostly saying that Mail hangs when checking IMAP accounts. The “I am checking your mail now” wheel next to the inbox turns very slowly or not at all and the app seems to freeze. Force Quitting is the only escape.
I read these reports with compassion, but with more compassion after it started to happen to me five or so days ago. My two IMAP accounts, one for work and one at my ISP, started to freeze up periodically. So I was overjoyed today to stumble on a tip from Roger Weeks at O’Reilly’s macdevcenter blog. He recommends typing “INBOX” (without the quotes) into the “IMAP Path prefix” field of the account’s Advanced Settings in Preferences.
I did this. It kicked all the other folders in one account out of a tree in the inbox where they had been displayed and put them further down the list of folders on the left under a grey globe of their own. No apparent change to the second IMAP account, but now the freezing problem seems to have done away.
A fix or a coincidence? I don’t know. What do you think?
The following comment left on Roger’s blog doesn’t sound promising:
Apple’s IMAP implementation still is seriously broken, as it cannot work with a namespace for public folders. In the IMAP world, there are several prefixes, one for personal folders, one for public folders, and one for folders of other users to which one may have access. Apple engineers have completely missed that point by providing only room for a single prefix. Just look at how Thunderbird handles that: three different prefix fields.
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September 14th, 2005 at 2:46 am
Yeah, this fix doesn’t work for me as all my mail folders are in $HOME/mail
I have to put my direct path in or else I cannot access my folders. Totally useless as I filter all my email through procmail still.
October 5th, 2005 at 2:56 pm
[...] Of course, this may prove to be a blessing in disguise for those afflicted with “the IMAP hang”, offering a quick exit without the need to mess about Force Quitting ;-) [...]
April 4th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
Happens to me too, all the time. How is anybody able to use apple mail? I also noticed that apple mail is able to create wild loads on the imap server when it starts hanging. Hallo, apple!
December 13th, 2006 at 3:33 am
I’ve noticed this happening to others I work with, but have managed to avoid it so far. It mostly seems to do with inbox size. My other folders are ridiculously large but my inbox is rarely over a few MB in size. I also use procmail for sorting (I occasionally find my self accessing my email via webmail or Versamail) and used to run an applescript to sync all of my folders get their unread counts and growl them so I could see what I need to check.
January 28th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
WOW!!!!
I tried this and for the first time in months I can actually use Apple Mail. That’s crazy. Thanks so much for the tip.
January 28th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
Excellent! It’s a pleasure to be helpful.