David Buxton at Reliably Broken has written a good explanation of the way Apple Mail treats email in POP and IMAP accounts, contrasting it (at the end) with the way Entourage handles each protocol.

As he notes:

Now when you go to remove an IMAP account Mail.app deletes all the local mailboxes for that IMAP account. This is not a problem, after all those local mailboxes are simple caches; the only reason the client keeps a copy is as a performance optimisation (as noted above).

Now when you remove a POP account Mail.app deletes all messages sent or received via that account, even though there will be no copy of those messages on the server (especially true for sent messages).

Not paying attention to this often has tragic results, as you can read in “The Mail POP Disaster: When it’s gone, it’s gone” and in Apple’s Mail Discussions (passim).

David dislikes this behaviour for POP accounts. He concludes: “This is not useful or intuitive – it is a bad design.” And he is not alone, by any means.

What do you think?

Not normally a huge Apple fan-boi, I actually side with the company on this one.

First, Apple gives you a big, fat warning when you attempt to delete a POP account, telling you quite plainly what will happen next — that this action will delete the settings, mailboxes and messages associated with that account:

Secondly, this behaviour makes sense. When you think of “an email account”, do you think of just the settings, or the mailboxes and email in that account as well? When users want to delete an account, Apple is right to take them at their word, and to delete everything.

Or to put it another way, to what extent are companies like Apple obliged to protect users from themselves? Some of my friends in User Support have strong (maximised) views on this, but may not be completely disinterested.

I might be wrong. I am open to persuasion. It just looks to me like Apple is getting panned for designing a process that actually does what the user wants.

Of course, the real moral of the story is not about design. It is backup, backup, backup!

It’s not Apple’s fault that so few people make them. I remember being appalled to learn during the 2006 WWDC Keynote that “only about four percent of users are utilizing automated software for backing up important files — only a quarter of users back up in any way whatsoever on a regular basis.” (Thanks to MacWorld for a transcript of the event)

Since Leopard, there’s no reason (apart from the performance hit and a few small annoyances) why people aren’t running Time Machine. Or one of the many other excellent backup solutions.

Just make sure that you are backing up up all the Mail files you should be.

Over at Rixstep , the blogger is in a fiesty mood. But in the midst of his claims about “a lot of buggy code in Mail.app” and how “Apple never respond with fixes”, he does raise a good point.

Snow Leopard, and Leopard before it, are not every good at deleting draft emails.

Its auto-save function leaves orphaned messages behind in its cache that are not registered in your Drafts folder (or on your IMAP server).

You can try this out for yourself.

First check your Drafts folder in Apple Mail and make sure that it looks empty.

Then open up your ~/Library/Mail folder, navigate to the Draft folder of your email account and open up the “Messages” folder. Although the folder shows iteslf empty in mail.app, in fact there are lots of auto-saved drafts in there!

Now if you are security conscious, or your work has particularly strict data management policies, then this is clearly a bad thing.

Otherwise, it’s just an annoying thing. They don’t do any harm but, still, Mail.app should be smarter than that.

Fortunately, the solution recommended by Rixstep–”you’ll have to go to the command line regularly to remove the orphans”–is not the only option.

There is a much easier way.

To remove the ghosts all you have to do is highlight the Drafts folder in Mail’s list of mailboxes on the left, and then select the Rebuild option from the Mailbox menu.

Poof! They’re gone.

Well, they are gone for the moment. You will need to do this again and again if the bug troubles you. And that’s the annoying part.

To make sure that is worked for you, you can check back in the Drafts folder of your Mail folder.

Mine looks good:

mail.app, apple mail, bugs, tips, imap, hopper, drafts, annoyances

Msgpush.com is a new web service that takes advantage of the iPhone 3.0 software to offer instant alerts on the iPhone when email arrives in your inbox.

When the iPhone was first released, there was a lot of hype about it offering true push email on the go for users. Everyone hoped that this would be provided through the IMAP IDLE extension, which would have made the feature available to all IMAP email services that support IMAP IDLE.

In fact, it turned out that this service was available first of all only to Yahoo.com mail users, and then later in the iPhone 2.0 software to Exchange users, and it doesn’t use IMAP IDLE.

The best my iPhone can do is poll my IMAP accounts through its “Fetch” feature every fifteen minutes.

Hoping to overcome this limitation, msgpush.com offers iPhone users the option to receive faster notification of new email by providing each user with a “fake Exchange account”.

Here’s how it works: You sign up at msgpush.com. It monitors your IMAP account through IMAP IDLE, and then sends notification of new mail to your iPhone through the Exchange protocol. Sounds clever, but there are some caveats:

1. You need to surrender your username and password for the IMAP account to msgpush.com, which not everyone will feel comfortable about.
2. You need to set up a new Exchange account on the iPhone to receive these notifications. But Exchange only allows you to run one profile at a time. So, if you have one configured already (as I do for my Zimbra account at work), this service is a non-starter.
3. It doesn’t actually read or push the email itself, only a notification that the email is waiting in your account’s inbox. So you still need to retrieve the email manually.
4. It’s still in beta and, according to some users, is proving a little erratic.

Still, even with these quibbles, it may be the solution that some users who can’t wait fifteen minutes are looking for.

I haven’t tested it (see 2. above), but you might like to. Sign up at the msgpush.com web site.

[With thanks to the Fastmail blog and forum posters ]

UPDATE: Tom Yager writes more on push email and the iPhone 3.0 software at InfoWorld. imap, imap idle, exchange, iphone, pushmail, notifications,

As MailTags forges it way towards an official Version 2.2, Scott Morrison has released the fourth public beta of the plugin.

In addition to a bunch of the usual improvements and bug-fixes (improving the reliability of the Spotlight Importer, tweaking some Preference options and settings, a nice resizable keyword token field which now displays all your tags), this latest release addresses a quirk with the way Gmail implements IMAP. In order to prevent problems, it now saves tags only to the local cache of Gmail accounts in Mail.app.

MailTags looks more polished, as Scott makes it into the most “native” plugin going around. It almost seems built-in to the app, rather than an added extra.

The pop-up dialogs for to-dos and events created on a Leopard Mail Note are now a fetching dark brown colour, which blends in nicely with the yellow lined-paper of the Note itself:

I missed the third public beta, being at the beach, so haven’t yet had a chance to note a change in the way MailTags is constructed.

Some elements are now split off as optional “extras” — plug-ins for the plug-in, so to speak — which promises a more efficient, more flexible, more user-customisable future.

It also provides a easy invitation for third-party developers to create specific MailTags plug-ins for their apps (OmniFocus, Yojimbo, Things, iGTD?).

Its iCal integration features are now a separate “extra” and a new feature, the Quick Message Colour Picker is another. It lets you colour-code the selected email with a single mouse click. A new Extras Preference Tab in the MailTags Pane controls their behaviour.

For example, in the Message Colour extra preferences, you can chose your preferred swatch colours and decide whether or not to delete the message colour when all MailTags info is deleted from an email.

If you don’t want an option to colour emails on the fly, you can just disable the extra in the Preferences:

Another small but useful feature in the new beta is the welcome return of the red icon to mark a tag that hasn’t been uploaded to the IMAP server yet. Mail users on dial-up connections at the beach (and probably elsewhere) will be pleased to see this back.

You can read more about MailTags for Leopard and download the newest, fourth public beta from Scott’s web site , where you will also find a forum for any questions, bug reports or comments. mail.app, apple mail, imap, tagging, productivity, mailtags, public beta, ical, applescript, events

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]mail.app, apple mail, gmail, google, imap, iphone, folders, tips

If you ever stop blogging for a bit due to an insane period in your Real Life, you will notice that eventually collections of interesting things begin to pile up in your inbox.

Over the last little while, three helpful on-line tutorials have appeared which offer Mail.app users extra tips on smart mailboxes, spam protection and setting up IMAP accounts.

Merlin Mann at 43Folders has written up some good tips on smart mailboxes , how to make them and how to use them to make yourself more productive. He includes screenshots of some useful smart mailbox setups which are ripe for copying or for sparking off your own thinking about how smart mailboxes could make your life easier.

Macinstruct writer Matthew Cone explains how Mail.app users can better protect themselves from spam by outlining the main methods for catching spam, how Apple Mail’s “latent semantic analysis” spam filter works and how to make the best use of it. Finally, the explains how to set up SpamSieve for those who need extra Bayesian protection.

Dan Rubin has discovered that “a surprisingly large number of people don’t know all the steps involved in properly configuring an IMAP account in Apple’s Mail.app.” He plugs the gap with a “mini-tutorial” on get it right, including Mail.app’s mysterious ” Use this mailbox for…” option which trips a lot of people up.mail.app, apple mail, productivity, smart mailboxes, spam, IMAP, junk mail, email

Michael Rothwell has written the code of his IMAP-IDLE plugin from the ground up to produce version 1.06 of his IMAP-IDLE which brings the “push mail” function to Mail.app.

When the plugin is installed, your IMAP server tells Mail.app when new mail arrives rather than Mail needing to poll the server repeatedly without finding anything new. This is obviously faster, more efficient and smarter.

The new version also features a new icon and and the beginnings of a Preference Pane:

I asked Michael what exactly had prompted the rewrite and he told me, “I switched to an OO design from the c-style switch-statement design. So the code is cleaner, and it works better.”

At which point I quickly realised I am too stupid to understand what actually happened, but that whatever it was, it’s good.

Michael also suggests on his web site that Leopard Mail is rumoured to have the IDLE feature built-in. That’s bad news for the IMAP-IDLE plugin, but good news for everyone else.

You can get IMAP-IDLE 1.06, which is freeware, from Michael’s web site . imap, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, push mail, oo design, c-style switch statement, email