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Create a colorless top-level Mail folder
Authored by: ikioi on Feb 11, '04 03:28:52PM

A better phrasing of the difference between blue and white folders is:

"Mailboxes that can contain both messages and other mailboxes are blue. Mailboxes that can contain only other mailboxes are colorless."

Basically what happens on the back side of many (IMAP for instance) mail stores is that a subfolder can exist even though the parent folder does not. For instance in Courier IMAP, the folders are stored as directories on the server with sub-folders delimited by dots. So ~/.cats.lions/ would be a subfolder of ~/.cats/ . But if ~/.cats didn't exist and ~/.cats.lions/ did, then in Mail, "cats" would be white while "cats->lions" would be blue. It would mean that you could drag messages or folders to "cats->lions", but you could only drag folders to "cats". So white folders are actually folder which don't exist but are show in Mail as an aid to the eyes.

So the way to make a white folder blue is to create it. So in this example, if you just told mail to create the folder "cats", then "cats" would turn from blue to white and then you would be allowed to store messages in cats. Similarly, if you delete a folder which has subfolders, then the folder you delete will go from blue to white and the subfolders will be left alone.

An interesting artifact of all of this is that sometimes it's possible to trick Mail into having a white folder with no subfolders. (This is useless to do, but you can do it.) You can do this by making "cats" then making "cats->lions" then deleting "cats" then deleting "cats->lions". This is a minor bug in Mail, and you can get rid of the "non-existent" ghost folder, "cats" by deleting it again, even though it actually doesn't exist.

Hopefully that's clearer than mud. :)



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Create a colorless top-level Mail folder
Authored by: miles_thatsme on Feb 11, '04 10:55:41PM

I initially thought this wasn't a particularly useful tip, either. Until I realized that I could prevent my IMAP server from automatically respawning an email called ".lastlogin" in a folder by a similar name. The message would respawn every mail check, which meant that with MailEnhancer, my unread mail count almost always read "1". I had tried simply locking the local file, but that crashed Mail. Creating a new white .lastlogin folder seems to be working.



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