Four ways for Mail users to beat Exchange’s public folders
Florian Beer has posted two tips 
which stop Mail.app syncing Exchange’s public folders.
One of them has been covered on Hawk Wings before, but the other one brings the list of possible work-arounds to four:
- Reorganise your Exchange folder tree. Create a new top-level subfolder and set an IMAP path to match.
- Tweak the settings in Windows Active Directory . If you have administrator rights, you can switch the syncing off at Exchange’s end.
- Perl it out of your life . Lars Eggert has written a Perl script which allows some control over which folders (if any) are synced.
- Lock the local cache. Florian’s second tip explains how to lock your local cache folders so that Exchange can’t sync with them.
Caveat Lector — I have absolutely no experience with Microsoft Exchange Server and no interest in acquiring some.
Tags: Apple Mail, email, exchange server, imap, local cache, mail.app, microsoft, perl, public foldersRelated posts
January 25th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Nice tips, thanks.
It’s important to note, however, that modifying the settings on the Exchange Server itself will affect all IMAP users’ access to public folders, so is therefore only an option if you don’t want to expose them at all.
More importantly, however, turning OFF the public folders on the server-side does not remove them from your Mail folders, nor your spotlight index. If you’re downloaded a lot of public folder information, this data will need to be cleared out manually be rebuilding the Envelope Index file (there are tips out there on how to do this, but I don’t have any URLs handy right now).
January 25th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Fortunately, I do have a URL to hand :)
“Rebuild your database and speed up Mail.app“
January 26th, 2007 at 4:56 am
Somehow I knew you would…. :)
January 27th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
I was lazy. I just went in to my Mac and linked all the directories I did not want synced with /dev/null. It seems to work.
February 1st, 2007 at 1:28 am
You can disable the IMAP Public Folder access on a per-user basis in Exchange 2003, and you don’t need to do it globally. However, in limited testing, I’ve had an Apple Mail client in Tiger refuse to launch (it force quits) when this change is made on a user’s Exchange account. In other testing, we’ve not had this happen. Just be forewarned, and prepared for the support call.
As for changing the path prefix for an Exchange account, I would never advise this. It can break compatibility of your Exchange account’s folders with other clients, like Outlook Web Access or Outlook, which will be bad if you need to log in with another client.
If you are stuck with only a local fix that applies to your computer, locking the local cache folder seems to be the least destructive option.
However, despite any warts, Entourage is a much fuller-featured Exchange client. Given that Apple is moving towards its own calendar server and has been so slow to address Exchange-related problems in Mail (really, Apple Mail is the only IMAP client I’d ever seen without the option to subscribe/unsubscribe from folders … Netscape Communicator 4 had this!), I doubt we’ll see much improvement in the overall Exchange support situation from Apple. There is much more to Exchange than just mail. We’ll see.