fred avolio's musings

As of a few weeks ago, I was still having the problem I mentioned in Still Love and Hate Mail. I had found that if I remembered to Go Offline, then Go Online again, all was well. If not, the Mail client and the IMAP server got confused about what my Inbox looked like. Clearly, the mailbox state wasn’t being updated until I disconnected. I religiously read the Apple discussion groups (for example, this thread). And found the solution.

As I posted in the above-mentioned thread

RE: IMAP deleted mail won’t stay deleted…
Posted: Sep 12, 2006 9:39 AM

> The following is an example of such a thread, and it
> contains a more extensive discussion of what the
> issue really is and why manually taking the account
> offline/online might work:
>
> http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=586858


I looked at this before, but I looked at it again and here is what I did. This may be something you can try. I am trying it. So far, so good.

You need to change your INBOX to .mbx format. (See http://www.washington.edu/imap/IMAP-FAQs/index.html#4.5 wherein we read,

If you create an mbx-format INBOX, by creating “#driver.mbx/INBOX” (note that “INBOX” must be all uppercase), then subsequent access to INBOX by any c-client based application will use the mbx-format INBOX. Any mail delivered to the traditional format mailbox in the spool directory (e.g. /var/spool/mail/$USER) will automatically be copied into the mbx-format INBOX and the spool directory copy removed.

Okay, cool How to create the INBOX. Conntect to your IMAP server using a telnet client and then issue the commands needed to create it. I saved my Inbox contents first, but this actually should not touch the spoolfile mailbox (On a UNIX system, this is something like /var/mail/fred for me and is in UNIX mailbox format.)

So, in terminal I did this (this is exactly what I typed except I typed in my real incomingmailserver name and my real password):

telnet incomingmailserver 143
a001 login fred mypassword
a001 create #driver.mbx/INBOX
a001 logout


See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2060.txt for IMAP commands.

Seems to be working fine. (It created INBOX in ~fred on my server, by the way.)

Fred

It is still working exactly as it is supposed to and I am completely happy with Mail.