Comments on: How Mail sucks (again), TUAW-style

By: Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » 20061114How Mail sux and (.Mac webmail too)

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:36:25 +0000

[...] Last year (26 October 2005) it was What’s wrong with Apple Mail and how it needs to be fixed. Twenty TUAW got into the spirit of things and listed their gripes which were interesting to read. [...]

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 14:24:48 +0000

Excellent!

I hope it’s a permanent fix.

By: burton hollifield

burton hollifield — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 14:00:22 +0000

Sorry for the bad english. Seem to work, at least so far… (I like you slow down cowboy note, too)

By: burton hollifield

burton hollifield — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 13:59:59 +0000

Bruno Rodrigues’ almost idea seemed to work so far.

Thanks again.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 05:05:02 +0000

That’s harsh. I’m a techie either, I’m afraid. Hunting around the web, there doesn’t seem to be a wide-shared set of instructions on how to set up Apple Mail for Cyrus.

I assume that you have done the usual things, like fiddle around with the IMAP path in the Advanced section of the account settings, putting in INBOX for example to see if that sorts it. And that you have asked the sysadmins who run the server what they recommend.

Indiana University uses Cyrus and they have a howto for mail.app:

http://kb.iu.edu/data/ajnm.html

Any joy there?

Bruno Rodgrigues who is no idiot and runs the Litux Blog reckons:

The trick with Apple Mail is to set the prefix before the first access to the IMAP account. You?¢‚Ç¨‚Ñ¢ll need to delete your current account, create a new one with an invalid password so that it doesn?¢‚Ç¨‚Ñ¢t connect, then go to advanced and set ?¢‚Ç¨?ìINBOX?¢‚Ç¨¬ù as prefix (no dot in the end). Now you can set the correct password and let Apple Mail go online.

Then you should go to the ?¢‚Ç¨?ìMailbox behaviours?¢‚Ç¨¬ù tab and disable all checkboxes. Then you click on each existing folder and use the menu Mailbox->Use Mailbox For, for each folder: Sent, Junk, Trash and Drafts.

This way Apple Mail should work.

By: burton hollifield

burton hollifield — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 03:41:28 +0000

Nope. Don’t have that access, and the dummy account one was a little unclear. I tried adding a new account to “mail” (I assume that is what it means) and the interface would not take a new imap from the same server. But maybe after some sleep, I will understand it better.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 03:24:24 +0000

It does seems an oversight to say the least.

Perhaps it is supposed to encourage you to use a .Mac account (which always seems to work flawlessly) ;-)

But did either of those tips work for you? Either setting the “altnamespace” option if you have that kind of access or setting up a “dummy” account?

By: burton hollifield

burton hollifield — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 03:12:19 +0000

I posted the cyrus beef on TUAW. Thanks for the pointer.

I am a bit puzzled that apple would have an application with the problem I mentioned. No other mail client I have played on my mac (t-bird, entourage, pine, mulberry) has that problem out of the box. Mail worked last year, and then just stopped.

thanks again and great site.