I’ve been having a lot of trouble with Mail.app recently. Having got IMAPS up and running on our server, everything has been pretty good. However, I noticed an issue today when I wanted to check on a mail I had sent earlier. The mail wasn’t in ‘Sent’! The only mails that were stored there were those that had been sent using the web interface (Squirrelmail). I also noticed the following message in Console.app:
I’ve been having a lot of trouble with Mail.app recently. Having got <span class="caps">IMAPS</span> up and running on our server, everything has been pretty good. However, I noticed an issue today when I wanted to check on a mail I had sent earlier. The mail wasn’t in ‘Sent’! The only mails that were stored there were those that had been sent using the web interface (Squirrelmail). I also noticed the following message in Console.app:
I had noticed this before but had never been able to tie it to a particular event, until now. Google didn’t help me this time unfortunately. Most of what it turned up related to the IMAP folder prefix which wasn’t the case here. Lots of places described this a Mail.app ‘bad behaviour’ issue. I decided to have a look in the Apple Discussion forums instead (I’m pretty sure they block them from being indexed or cached by Google). No joy when searching for my ‘Invalid mailbox name’ so I had to resort to going through all issue with sent items in Mail.app that had been posted. Very fortunate for me; I didn’t have to look for long for something that was suggested yesterday! Allan, the poster had suggested to another user to do the following with particular mailboxes:
To save copies of messages in a different mailbox, select the mailbox you want to use. Choose Mailbox > Use This Mailbox For > Sent.
Problem solved and a good start to the Year of the Rooster. To see how this works, here’s an account as it would appear when I’ve just added it under Preferences > Account:
Selecting each of; Drafts, Sent and Trash then setting ‘Use This Mailbox For …’ then gives you a Mailbox with only your folders (‘some other mailbox’ in my case), while Sent, Draft and Trash appear under the Mail.app Sent, Draft and Trash mailboxes with the account name as their label.