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

I love Mail.app to death, but I am willing to admit that its IMAP support is less robust than it could be.

So the clever irony of this Freudian slip in a blogger’s headline struck me at once:

Sometimes Mail does frantically spin its wheels without getting anywhere. It needs a thrash folder.

However, the post he references on setting up Mail’s special IMAP folders for Sent, Drafts, Trash and Junk mail is excellent. Not knowing about this is a source of frustration to a lot of people on the Apple Discussion Boards and elsewhere.humour, mail.app, apple mail, imap, special folders, sent, drafts, junk, trash, IMAPSimilar Posts:

• A mendable Mail.app IMAP mailbox mess
• Gmail IMAP, Mail.app and iPhone Mail in harmony
• iNotify.saver: Screensaver notification
• Fixing Mail.app’s Undeleted Drafts Bug
• The “Hasta la Vista” icon replacement set