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).

Tags: Apple Mail, dog's breakfast, folders, imap, IMAP path prefix, mail.app, mailboxes, special folders, unhappy user

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A German blogger wrote a post that deserves a wider hearing, if only because its passion is so heart-felt:

You email maniacs out there, let me tell you something — Never trust your emails to Apple Mail.

Really. I have not come across such an awful piece of email software for a long time. And I test all sorts of pre-Alpha releases.

But Apple Mail? With IMAP? Forget it! Gruesome.

I need pretty well four tries before an email is really properly marked as read.

Threading by name is not available. Who hit upon the silly idea of implementing threading by subject only? Why do you think the mail server puts equally clear message IDs in the headers?

Spam? It remains a puzzle to me how exactly Apple Mail learns if an email is spam or not.

But after marking the twentieth incorrectly-identified email from Deutsche Welle as ‘Not Spam’, even this wretched piece of software ought to recognise that I want to read them.

Sometimes I think that I would use my time more productively if I were to throw myself into RoundCube’s code and fix bugs or try my hand at producing some extensions (PGP-plugin, spam filter, threading). Then at least I would know who to blame if something goes wrong.

To the people at Apple who I have to thank for the opportunity of searching through my backups for two weeks of emails: May your hard disk disintegrate into its constituent parts and your backups get eaten by a dog!

This is a quick and dirty, unpolished translation. But as you can see from BabelFish’s effort after the jump, humans do not need to fear that computers will corner the translation market anytime soon.

(more…)

Tags: Apple Mail, german, imap, mail.app, marking mail as read, spam, threading, unhappy user

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