Comments on: Apple Mail’s most annoying bug?

By: The trouble with Mail at Random Neural Misfirings

The trouble with Mail at Random Neural Misfirings — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 21:57:35 +0000

[...] I’ve recently started reading Hawk Wings, a blog focused mostly on Apple’s Mail.app and other personal-information programs like iCal and Address Book. I’m always keen on ways to tweak Mail, but I was moved to actually write about it by the recent post Mail’s most annoying bug. It got me thinking about all the ways Mail could be better. [...]

By: sjk

sjk — Fri, 26 May 2006 20:33:18 +0000

Hi Marc. Did the issue you describe happen after creating a new rule with the “Move message” action and letting “Do you want to apply your rules to messages in open mailboxes?” run it? I recently did something like that with one of my wife’s IMAP mailboxes and due to an error it unintentionally moved many older messages and deleted them from the original mailbox. But the destination mailbox may have been local, not an IMAP mailbox… I’d have to double-check that.

This could be something to do with whether or not the original message in inbox had a local copy of its body or not.

Interesting thought. I think my wife’s account is configured to copy everything except attachments.

Which IMAP server software does your account use? My wife’s FastMail account uses Cyrus IMAP.

One problem I occasionally have when moving messages between IMAP mailboxes is they don’t immediately appear in the destination. That happened again yesterday when moving a message from Junk to INBOX. And a couple months ago I irrecoverably lost a couple messages moved from Junk to INBOX. That account uses UW-IMAP, if that matters. UW-IMAP was completely reliable for home usage with Mulberry so I’d rather blame Mail.

There was recent discussion in A solution to Mail.appâ€™s IMAP woes about the IMAP protocol not having a “move message” operation. I’ve wondered if problems Mail has moving messages under IMAP account might be implementation bugs related to that.

By: Marc Palmer

Marc Palmer — Fri, 26 May 2006 10:16:08 +0000

The one that really annoys me at the moment is that the “Move message” action of rules will not move messages from inbox (that are say > 365 days old) to another IMAP folder properly. The messages are moved but it does not DELETE the original message from inbox.

This could be something to do with whether or not the original message in inbox had a local copy of its body or not. Either way, it’s completely broken.

By: sjk

sjk — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 19:34:35 +0000

Yeah, that’ll probably work. Just wondered if there were a quicker “Don’t use this mailbox for …” method I’d overlooked.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 06:10:36 +0000

How about creating a new empty mailbox on the IMAP server, selecting it and then nominating it with the “Use this mailbox for…”, thus freeing up the one you want released.

Then you can delete the new one, leaving the choice available again.

Will that work?

By: sjk

sjk — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 05:38:37 +0000

Any recommendations how to undo an “Use this mailbox forâ€¦” operation without deleting the mailbox?

By: CM Harrington

CM Harrington — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 14:25:57 +0000

@gerry

No problem. As for escaping Apple’s notice, clearly it hasn’t (as the discussion is on Apple’s servers). They have just chosen not to fix it. There is a difference, and one that doesn’t make Apple look good.

By: gerry

gerry — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 14:22:35 +0000

Thanks – I managed to google it; it was buried in a discussion on Apple’s support site. It works but how the hell has this escaped Apple’s notice?

By: CM Harrington

CM Harrington — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 14:06:49 +0000

@gerry:

The workaround, if you haven’t seen it yet, is simple.

1) create a folder on the server. Name it anything you want (although I think Sent Mail may be reserved)

2) Select the new folder on the server

3) in the Mailbox menu, choose “Use this mailbox forâ€¦”, and choose “sent mail”

That will trick it into working. You may have to do this for all accounts

By: gerry

gerry — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 10:29:36 +0000

CM Harrington wrote:

“First, there is the â€œsave sent mail on serverâ€ bug where, well, it doesnâ€™t (although there is a workaround)”

PLEASE tell us the workaround – I have this happenming on a friend’s machine and it’s driving us mad!