10.4: Regain missing Sent and Drafts folders in Mail

Jul 05, '05 10:04:00AM

Contributed by: pink

Tiger only hintAfter working for some days with Tiger's Mail.app, I realized that I could not save drafts and that there was no "Sent" folder (and that all my sent messages had disappeared). When I clicked on the little reply arrow next to any message, an error message would pop up saying Mail was unable to find your response to the message "�. You may have deleted the message, which of course, I had not.

This appears to be a known bug (see this discussion). After some testing, it was clear that this was specific to the IMAP account I use, and that my POP accounts were fine. The solution I finally found was this...

On the IMAP server, I created folders called "Sent" and "Drafts" from within the Inbox, and copied one mail each into the folders. I neither know if it is important to have the folders nested into the Inbox, nor if you have to put a mail inside; it's just the way I did it. I then restarted Mail to have these folders show up as subfolders within the Inbox. From there, I selected "Sent" and chose Mailbox -> Use this Mailbox for -> Sent, and did the same thing for "Drafts." Strangely enough, the two folders disappeared and the "Sent" and "Drafts" folders popped up in their usual locations. Things have been fine so far.

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