Hmmm…. Late to the party on this one, but still worth posting.

Derek Punsalan has posted a comprehensive guide to getting Gmail’s new IMAP service, Apple Mail and the iPhone’s Mail.app working together in perfect harmony.

He explains how to mail the special folders in Mail.app (Sent, Draft, Trash) to the correct ones in your Gmail account, and then how to match them in the Gmail account on your iPhone.

He also provides a summary of several clever tips that were left in the 212 comments to the post, including how to use Gmail without all the Gmail folder hierarchy, and how Mail.app flags and Gmail stars are the same thing.

Curiously, he doesn’t mention a tip for email hoarders. If you like to keep everything, select Gmail’s all mail folder and under Mail.app’s Mailbox > Use this mailbox for… menu option, select Trash.

Then your delete key becomes a quick archive shortcut.

Of course, there are many reasons why this might be a bad idea — See an earlier Hawk Wings post on Why the delete key is your best friend.

[Via just about everyone]

Related posts

• Mail.app, Gmail domain hosting, pine
• IMAP, POP, Gmail and the future of email
• Gmail, mail.app and IMAP, Part II
• Folder Action applescript for archiving files on Gmail
• Five tutorials on using Mail.app

Not everyone is a fan of the new-fangled “tag ‘em, archive ‘em and let Spotlight sort ‘em out” school of email storage, described in past Hawk Wings posts like “Use MailTags and kiss your folders goodbye” and “Mail.app without folders (or tears)” (which points to some interesting research on why people can’t give up their folders).

At the end of the day, some people just like having things organised neatly into instantly recognisable piles.

For them Doug Hellman has produced an applescript that automates the process of archiving emails by year and month.

As he says on his web site, “Each time it processes a message, it automatically maintains a folder hierarchy based on the parent, year, and month”. Doug also provides instructions on setting it up to work with a Mail Act-on rule.

The script has recently been updated.

In version 1.2 he has updated the scripts,

to make them more reliable as mail rule actions by using the perform_mail_action hook and taking the selection from the info passed in instead of asking Mail for the current selection.

I don’t know what this means, but it impresses the hell out of me.

Related posts

• Folder Action applescript for archiving files on Gmail
• Five tutorials on using Mail.app
• Using Mail.app as a document archive
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The writer of academhack has republished a series of five tutorials on how to get the best out of Mail.app.

He is an academic, and writes chiefly with professors and their students in mind. Still, the tips, ideas and workflows that he demonstrates will be useful to everyone.

He covers the absolute basics in the first tutorial. A second one covers things like weening yourself off webmail and why IMAP is better.

How to get students to use email properly makes up the third and the fourth deals with important things like sorting email and keeping the inbox clean.

The last one covers keyboard shortcuts and contains a nice screencast on using Mail Act-on to sort emails quickly:

Hardcore Mail.app productivity nuts will not find much here that they didn’t know before. But looking over how someone else deals with their email always prompts me to think again about how I do it and often leads me to develop a better way.

And not everyone is hardcore. I get regular emails from remote acquaintences, friends of my wife’s hairdresser, people who stumble across Hawk Wings on the net and others who want to know all about how to use Mail better. Now I have somewhere to send them. That’s a big productivity boost for me, and maybe for you too.

In any case, academics who write about using Mail.app are pretty thin on the ground. That sort of thing ought to be encouraged.

Related posts

• Getting Things Done in Apple Mail
• Using Mail.app as a Yojimbo substitute
• Six tricks to get your email organised
• Script to archive mail.app messages by month
• Quickies: A Sunday brunch of Mail.app links

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).

Related posts

• Oh, the pain, the pain! IMAP in Mail.app
• IMAPCheck: Plugin for server-side mailboxes
• Speed up your Mac: Software tweaks
• Russin’ Frussin’ Cussin’ Mail.app
• Gmail IMAP, Mail.app and iPhone Mail in harmony

Daniel Bingham has written a plugin that fixes a particular problem with Mail.app’s IMAP support.

IMAPCheck corrects Mail.app’s habit of not seeing email that has been moved into IMAP subfolders by server-side rules until you actually open the subfolder.

Instead, it forces Mail to do a full sync every time, which will increase the traffic between your IMAP server and your Mac, but will also pick up emails that you might not otherwise see.

This plugin differs from IMAP-IDLE, a plugin that creates support in Mail for IMAP’s IDLE feature.

With IMAP-IDLE installed, Mail knows about email arriving in your inbox right away. IMAPCheck lets you know about email that has arrived and been moved into another IMAP folder.

IMAPCheck comes with one limitation:

It still does not enable rules support on IMAP accounts. This bundle WILL allow Mail.app to see the new email, but it still doesn’t process rules in those folders. I looked briefly into enabling rules on these folders, but it seems to be something built directly into POP Account support.

I don’t have any server-side rules myself, but those who do will be glad of this new option.

It’s donation-ware and you can get it from Daniel’s web site .

Related posts

• Oh, the pain, the pain! IMAP in Mail.app
• Five tutorials on using Mail.app
• A mendable Mail.app IMAP mailbox mess
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• Remotely control your Mac via AppleScript

Adam Tow has produced a plugin for Mail.app that offers an option for quickly filing messages.

It operates on the same principle as the QuickFile extension for Thunderbird and (for old-timers) the ’s’ keystroke in Pine (and maybe mutt too, unless memory fails me).

All you need to do is select the message to be filed. Press ⌘-9 or select “Move with MsgFiler” from the Message menu, and a dialog appears into which you start typing the name of the mailboxes while it matches what you type:

The down-arrow key selects the match and the message has gone, filed neatly away.

Alex King (WordPress developer and more ) raves about it. He says it’s

an absolute must have add-on for Mail.app users that file messages. Trust me, this puppy will save you serious time every day. Go download it now, then come back here and read more of the back story.

I’m in two minds.

Whether or not this is useful for you will depend on your workflow. Mail Act-on rules for filing can be executed with a single keystroke. They are much faster than this. But I have pretty much abandoned folders. “One archive to kill them all and let Spotlight (and MailTags) sort ‘em out” is now my motto. Mail Act-on is the faster filing solution for people like me.

Still, some people like folders. I had an email from a Hawk Wings reader just the other day asking how to file things quickly into his more than 1,000 folders. This may be the plugin for him.

MsgFiler is shareware (USD 8 for a limited time, normally 12) and is available from the developer’s web site .

Bonus historical appendix

The phrase “Kill them all and let God sort ‘em out” has its origins in the Crusades.

During the Albigensian Crusade in 1209 CE against the Cathar heresy in Southern France, the forces of mainstream Catholicism were besieging the city of Beziers, defended by Cathar heretics. Finally they breached the walls of the city and prepared to storm it.

The commander of the crusade, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, pointed out that not everybody in the city was a heretic, some of them were good Catholics, so how should they treat the inhabitants when they captured the city?

A monk who was actually present at the siege recorded the answer of the Papal Legate to the Crusaders and Abbot of Citeaux, Arnaud-Amaury, as Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet (”Kill them all. God will know his own.” ) The Crusaders followed his advice.

Wait a minute… Is this history or current affairs?

Related posts

• While I was busy…
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