Fix deep Inbox hierarchy problem in Mail

May 27, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: shapiro

Several times in the past couple of years, I experienced an annoying mailbug: the Inbox becomes a deep hierarchy of Inbox » Inbox » Inbox » ...repeat... » xxxx, where xxxx is the name of one of the special mailboxes (Trash, Drafts, or Outbox). Every simple fix I tried would only make things worse.

I finally traced the issue to a bad interaction between Mail, the IMAP server, and the iPhone. I'm not sure which of these is ultimately responsible, but somehow, one of the three would use a different location for one of the special mailboxes.

I was finally able to fix the problem, by following these steps:

  1. Identify the file name of the special mailboxes. To do so, I quit Mail and connected to the webmail server interface, where I created a draft message, an outgoing message, and a deleted message, each with known content. Then I disconnected from the webmail. In Mail, I searched for the content I had just created. This enabled me to identify the current name of the special mailboxes.
  2. In Mail, use the Mailbox » Use This Mailbox For menu to correctly identify each special mailbox.
  3. In iTunes (this is the crucial step), under iPhone » Info » Mail Accounts, select 'Sync selected Mail accounts.' Under iPhone » Info » Advanced, select 'Replace information on this iPhone: Mail Accounts,' then sync the iPhone.
I discovered afterwards that the first step can probably be simplified, from two different angles. First, my webmail has an interface letting me set the mailbox file names. Second, in the left sidebar of Mail, hovering the mouse above a mailbox tells you its file location. My configuration: MacOS 10.5.6 PPC; iPhone 2.2.1; Courier IMAP server.

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