Having recently posted four work-arounds to stop Mail subscribing to the public folders in Microsoft Exchange Server, I am delighted to discover that soon none of them will be necessary.

Leopard Mail has an elegant built-in solution to this problem.

Mail Stamps developer Andrew Escobar has posted a detailed account of how the new feature will work.

When an Exchange account is highlighted, choosing the “Get Account Info” item in the contextual menu item (or ⌘-I) pops up a new window that allows users to unsubscribe to the public folders:

Problem solved. And another upside?

After the fix, I never have to deal with Public Folders again. While I’m still using Tiger on a daily basis, once Leopard ships in the spring of 2007, I’ll finally be able to ditch Entourage and use Mail as my sole email client.

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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:

1. Reorganise your Exchange folder tree. Create a new top-level subfolder and set an IMAP path to match.
2. Tweak the settings in Windows Active Directory . If you have administrator rights, you can switch the syncing off at Exchange’s end.
3. Perl it out of your life . Lars Eggert has written a Perl script which allows some control over which folders (if any) are synced.
4. 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. mail.app, apple mail, microsoft, exchange server, imap, public folders, perl, local cache, email

Emory has posted a simple fix for the annoyance of using Mail.app with Exchange server, that works for him.

Mail.app’s lack of support for folder subscriptions mean that you have to deal with numerous folders on Exchange server that you wish you didn’t have to see.

He finds that Lars Eggert’s Perl Script for filtering IMAP folders is a little flaky. And he doesn’t much care for other tips to deal with this problem.

He recommends creating a top level subfolder instead and creating the folders you want to have underneath that. Setting the IMAP prefix to your top-level subfolder means that Mail.app ignores everything else.mail.app, apple mail, IMAP, exhange server, public folders, subscriptions, tips