10.3: Use iDisk capacity to store excess .mac mail

Oct 28, '03 01:25:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I use Apple's .Mac e-mail service which is great when you want to access your mail on more than one machine, in my case that's a desktop and a laptop. I've always wanted to use more of my 100MB iDisk for storing e-mail, my 15MB e-mail space is often a bit tight and I could have bought more but hey, I've got 100MB doing next to nothing.... With Panther it's much easier to use your iDisk.

First, set your .Mac preferences to keep a local copy of your iDisk on each Mac where you want to access the mail; and to automatically update. Next, on the first Mac go into Apple Mail and create a new mailbox "On Your Mac" called iDisk; quit Mail.

Go looking in your home folder -> Library -> Mail -> Mailboxes folder to find iDisk.mbox, drag and drop (copy) that file to your iDisk's Documents folder. Go back to where you found your iDisk.mbox and delete it. Now, I'm afraid you need to go into Terminal and enter these commands:

cd ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes
ln -s /Volumes/iDisk/Documents/iDisk.mbox iDisk.mbox
Get out of Terminal!! The second line creates a link between your mailbox folder and your iDisk, kind of like an alias. Fire up Apple Mail again and voila there's your mailbox to which you can move mail but it will go onto your local iDisk and when your Mac automatically updates it will be safe on Apple's servers. To view the mail on another Mac do everything above but leave out the drag and drop of the iDisk.mbox file (it already exists of course).

The only downside I can see is if you drag new mail onto the local copy of your iDisk on more than one machine before each has had a chance to update Apple's servers (one will probably overwrite the other) but that's a problem for other files too - not sure how Apple handles that....

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one myself...]

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