I became a convert to Mail.app on Mac OS X from the first day I tried it. That isn’t to say that it was perfect, but I preferred putting up with the flaws in Mail.app than the flaws in other email clients. Now that I’ve upgraded to Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) the same is still true. There are still plenty of things I personally would change about Mail.app 2, but it still seems to be the least evil of all my evil choices for email clients on the Mac.
If you use an IMAP email server then you are probably already familiar with the “IMAP Path Prefix” setting in Mail.app. Apple made a change in the way that setting works in Mail.app that bit me when I tried to connect to a UW IMAP server. In my case the path was “/home/scottj/mail”, which generally works fine in most IMAP email clients. In Mail.app on Tiger though it kept removing the first slash, so my /home/scottj/mail kept turning into home/scottj/mail, which is not the same thing. It appears (I haven’t seen this confirmed anywhere) that Mail.app in Tiger now really wants to have a relative path for the “IMAP Path Prefix”. So I changed my /home/scottj/mail to simply mail and then suddenly worked as before.
If you are connecting to a Courier-IMAP server (which I am also doing) you can still set your “IMAP Path Prefix” to INBOX to make Mail.app understand that it shouldn’t put all of the folders as sub-folders of your inbox.
If you’ve got any other tips for making Mail.app play nice with various email servers leave a comment below. At some point the UW-IMAP server that I connect to now will be replaced with an Exchange 2003 server, I’ll leave another note about that if I run into any issues.
21 replies on “Mail.app IMAP Path Prefix Changes”
I’m trying to get mail to work with exchange 2003, i’d appreciate any help you could offer me as well. =o)
I have this wonderful problem with Mail.app connecting to UW IMAP on Tiger where the messages in my inbox like to disappear. Mail.app will only show messages that have appeared since I began that session. All my old messages in my inbox are a no-go.
John-
I’m still a few months out from setting up our Exchange 2003 server at work, so I don’t have any info on that.
Ryan-
I double checked my UW IMAP account, Mail.app is pulling in all of the emails. One thing I have noticed though is that Mail.app often displays an incorrect number of unread messages. When I select the folder it then recalculates to the correct number.
Sorry I don’t have more info at this point.
I am having the same disappearing inbox problems with UW-IMAP on RHEL ES 3. My messages only appear for that session. Closing and re-opening mail.app will result in a count of 0 messages.
I had another problem. On 10.3, I had a prefix string being “imap/”. In 10.4, Mail refused to open my nested mailboxes, it only opened the toplevel mailboxes. After removing the “/”, thus only filling in “imap”, it worked.
Noooowhere documented. Your page on this item made me experiment on this value….
[…] Joseph Scott is convinced that Apple Mail is “the least evil of all my evil choices for email clients on the Mac”. (That’s happy, isn’t it?) […]
Cool, thanks for the INBOX IMAP path prefix hint!! I was a bit annoyed be ›mixed‹ mailbox layout with on Courier account (FastMail) and on a SUN Internet Mail Server …
FastMail uses Cyrus IMAP, not Courier.
I have the dissapearing email problem too, it is spooky, have lost a lot of important stuff there, did anybody find a fix to this??
Thanks for the INBOX path prefix thing. This made it possible to move all my mail to my IMAP server. Ok, it would have been possible without that, but this makes it really useable.
It seems like a lot of us have a problem with Exchange 2003 and Mail.app. Mail.app used to work fine with previous versions of Exchange as far a I recall. But now with Exchange 2003… and Entourage works fine! Damned M$!
Tom-
I was able to use an Exchange 2003 account from Mail.app without any problems. For the account type I used ‘Exchange’, and pointed it to the OWA (Outlook Web Access) site. I didn’t change any other settings and was able to receive email just fine.
Could the person who got Mail.app to work with Exchange 2003 please give more detail. A step by step, a website reference anything. I have checked Apple, MS and have not found any information. Entourage is constantly freezing and I need to find a way to get Mail.app to work.
I have connected mail to our MS Exchange 2003 server. When setting up the account, I chose “Exchange” as the option and made sure it kept NTLM authentication. Strange part, though, is that it used just may username not domain/username which I was not used to. For OWA, it may require HTTPS (ours did).
That said, if anyone knows how I can disable the @#$@# public folders from showing up / being sync’d, it’d be great. It’s such a pain to watch it sync some 100k emails in there when I have no desire to read ’em.
KellyF
Kelly:
I picked up this hint from a PDF I found while looking for how to set up delegates, this is probably what you are looking for: TO disable public folder syncing:
1. quit mail.app
2. go to your Library/Mail/ folder, look in the exchange box there, and find the Public Folders folder.
3. Do get info (cmd-i)
4. set permissions to “No access”.
5. next time you start up mail, you’ll see the public folders still, but they won’t have any content, and won’t sync.
Now…
If anyone knows how to read a delegate account in Mail, or how to set up 2 exchange accounts (I can create one, but after that, only choic e is IMAP or POP), or how to get the stupid calendar link to actually point to our web exchange server that I specified in the prefs, instead of to the incoming exchange server, I’d be a happy man.
Micah
[…] 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). […]
[…] http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/archives/2005/05/02/mailapp-imap-path-prefix-changes/ […]
I also have mail disappearing from my inbox. It is still saved on the server, as I can see it on OWA, but my inbox is completely empty on mail.app. Anyone??
[…] I also have mail disappearing from my inbox. It is still saved on the server, as I can see it on OWA, but my inbox is completely empty on mail.app. Anyone?? […]
I came across the same problem; after years of problem-free use the file system of my server that runs Courier IMAP filled up. After cleaning up the partition and restarting imapd, the messages in my Inbox don’t show anymore. However, all subfolders of the Inbox DO show up and are updated. Strangely enough, even the unread count is being updated in the Inbox — but neither old nor new messages appear in the message list.
I’ve tried to completely remove the IMAP account from the Mail.app prefs as well as wiped out ~/Library/Mail/IMAP-my-account to no avail; hence I suspect that the problem might be on the server side. But then Thunderbird shows all the messages in the same Inbox correctly… I’m puzzled.
Did you by any chance solve this mystery?
Thanks for any hint,
Peter
Thanks a lot for the tip regarding the Courier-IMAP server’s INBOX path. I was having a hell of time with Mail.app before and now I’m all happy! If only I could figure out where the trash goes….
@Thomas Vanparys-
No problem, it bugged me for awhile as well, which is why I wrote this up in the first place.
As for trash, I think by default it uses a folder named Trash.