A mendable Mail.app IMAP mailbox mess
Jon at WizardIsHungry 
is an unhappy Mail user.
He has three accounts, a Gmail account and two IMAP ones, but the mailboxes won’t behave the way he wants them to (as you can see on the right).
It’s a mess. One IMAP account is displaying its folders under the Account’s Inbox; the other “breaks them out” under a globe further down the Mailbox Viewer.
As if that’s not bad enough, Mail.app is also eating his draft and sent messages instead of storing them in one of his two (!) Sent folders.
Abstruse error messages in the Console only add insult to injury.
Enough’s enough. It’s good-bye to Mail.app as far as Jon is concerned:
So I guess I’ll be migrating to Thunderbird once I get a free couple days to export all my mail and regenerate my IMAP mailbox. If anyone has any hints about migration or using Thunderbird, I’d like to hear them.
Luckily for him, Derik DeLong from MacUser posted all the answers in a comment to Jon’s post.
Some of his problems can be fixed by setting the right IMAP path prefix for his email provider (More on this in a post and comments on Joseph Scott’s blog).
The rest can be fixed by using the Mailbox -> Use This Mailbox For… menu option to set the folders that Mail uses for its Draft, Sent, Trash and Junk mailboxes (See Apple’s technote on this for more).
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December 13th, 2006 at 6:22 am
Thank you! I have been having similar problems and your links fixed them all. Awesome!
December 13th, 2006 at 9:31 am
When to use Google to solve your problems and when to solve things yourself…
Recently I posted about having problems with Apple Mail and, like magic, Derik from MacUser arrived and solved all my problems and my story was quickly reblogged on Hawk Wings. It is great that Apple’s products have such an enthusiastic user comm…
December 13th, 2006 at 10:37 am
i had the same problem …
but it was not a mess …
my sent items didn’t sync properly …
now it does …
thanks for the tip …
December 16th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
Does anyone know if there is an apple script that will automatically update all the smart folders once the mail is checked? I use MailTags and smart folders to replicate gmail locally, and the only thing I have yet to make it do is tell me how many emails are in a smart folder without actually going into that folder.
January 21st, 2007 at 3:33 pm
I just wanted to thank you for blogging this, as I had the exact same problem and this helped me fix it.
December 18th, 2007 at 11:17 am
I also have sound some issues with Mail.app using smart folders and iMap, as while i was writing a Gmail message, adding pictures and making revisions every ‘autosave’ that was happening was showing as a ‘new unread message’ in the Gmail- trash account.
I think i should of stuck with POP..