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).mail.app, apple mail, IMAP, mailboxes, folders, special folders, IMAP path prefix, unhappy user, dog’s breakfastSimilar Posts:

• A fix for “The IMAP Hang” or just lucky?
• Thunderbird IMAP bugs
• Oh, the pain, the pain! IMAP in Mail.app
• Clean out old IMAP caches to regain some space
• Apple Mail Rules and IMAP folders

The author has gone over it and highlighted at least eight different styles in the interface.

It’s a horrible mess. Just the kind of thing that Mac users like to pooh-pooh.

Go on, take a look. Rejoice in the simple elegance that is Mail.app’s interface. Enjoy yourself. I did.interface design, Microsoft, not apple mail, dog’s breakfast, office 12, outlookSimilar Posts:

• Outlook 2007 beta 2: screenshots, commentary
• Microsoft Outlook to remain HTML non-compliant
• Outlook 2007′s HTML rendering stuff-up
• What if Microsoft had designed Gmail?
• From Outlook to Mail.app with libpst