One *key* thing seems to be how you set the caching options.

* In “Mail.app - Preferences - Accounts - - Advanced”
* Set “Keep copies of messages for offline viewing:” to “All messages, but omit attachments”

One problem I have seen is that on *very* slow mail servers (talking > 5 seconds to load each message over a LAN) Mail.app does seem to freak out and doesn’t seem to be able to manage your read/unread message states. Which is infuriating :-)

PS. I’m also a sysadmin who used to support a fairly large mail server with lots of Thunderbird and Mail.app (and other sundry) clients.

I regularly hear complaint about poor IMAP support and I have the same amounts of messages and data that many of you have across two different account, BOTH of which are served by OS X Servers.

It is possible that Mail’s IMAP support isn’t THAT bad, but is rather just incompatible with some of the plethora of different IMAP servers out there? Does it use something proprietary to allow it to be painlessly compatible with OS X Server?

I haven’t in fact archived it in any fancy way at all. They are all in normal folders. I tend to shy away from dedicated archiving apps like MailSteward and to trust in the power of Spotlight instead.

Still, I’m tempted by EagleFiler.

The Outbox only appears if Mail can’t actually send the email for some reason.

Admittedly, it stays visible after connectivity is restored and the email is sent, which is untidy.

Liam! Are you using a Mac now? :)

Yeah! For sure! Brand-spanking new MacBook. Well, maybe not so new. I bought it in August.

I’ve archived them off as a result which is less than ideal, esp, if you need to search them for data.

Did you do that in a similar way to how I did it? Or have you devised some far more efficient way that I could never imagine dreaming up? :)

ps — I like the tunnel picture at the top; it took me a while to figure out what it was, but I appreciate it now that I understand!

I have this problem only with the folder containing my Whirlpool emails. Too much gas-bagging and not enough article writing ;-)

I’ve archived them off as a result which is less than ideal, esp, if you need to search them for data.

My account has more than 20,000 messages, which was stubbornly slow to load. So I moved most of the old ones to a separate folder which I only use when I’m searching through my archives. It’s annoying, but at least it band-aids the slow-load problem.

As for a PAC file, I don’t seem to be able to connect at all through my uni proxy. Again, extremely annoying.

Am I the only one with Large IMAP issues?

Certainly not…

http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/08/21/can-mailapp-cope-with-heavy-loads/