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Stop Mail.app from caching too many IMAP folders
Authored by: lynxie on Jun 29, '05 11:54:44AM

Hm... We have a Public Folder on our Exchange server accessible to everyone, so Mail.app checks and caches all those messages, calendar events and attachments (10000+) at every start, which is not very nice when I'm on dial-up.
The way I got around it was to close Mail, open Library -> Mail -> Exchange Account -> Public Folders and erase its content. Then I went ahead locked the folder and set the permissions to "No Access" for me, group and others. Now even if I click on it, Mail doesn't query the server for info. A bit of an overkill, but I really dislike the Public Folders...



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Stop Mail.app from caching too many IMAP folders
Authored by: moritzh on Jun 29, '05 01:26:17PM

Already in 10.3 I replaced the "Public Folders" folder with a symbolic link to /dev/null. This at least prevents useless stuff from the folders to be written to my disk, waste space and get indexed by Spotlight. But still the folders are queried. Also tried your approach with chmod 000 and locking, and seems to do exactly the same thing: No messages are stored, but the folders on the server are still queried. Or that's what I think because if I delete all caches and force Mail to update everything, it initially shows 0 new messages in the public folders, but later ~100'000. Can you confirm? I am using an Exchange Server but I'll try later and set up the account as plain IMAP instead (don't think this will help, but let's see).

I really hate that Mail.app doesn't let you subscribe to/unsubscribe from IMAP folders. Any decent mail program can do that. Already complained several times to Apple about it.



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Stop Mail.app from caching too many IMAP folders
Authored by: moritzh on Jun 29, '05 01:52:09PM

Just a quick update: Also tried it with my acount setup as IMAP rather than Exchange Server, but I got the same results.

But I realized that setting it up as Exchange server is much better (for me at least) because as IMAP I get many error messages during synchronisation regarding some of the public folders that I don't seem to have permissions to view. I need to dismiss every single one of them by clicking OK, and there are many. Set up as an Exchange Server, Mail.app seems to silently ignore those folders (so it seems at least - unlesss this is a once-only thing and I did that when I initially set up my Exchange account [can't remember, I changed setting so often recently]).



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Stop Mail.app from caching too many IMAP folders
Authored by: lynxie on Jun 30, '05 11:19:23AM

Yep, I just checked, you're right it still queries the server, both wen configured as an IMAP and an Exchange client. Maybe it's the placebo effect, but it feels a bit faster when I have the folder locked and 000oed.



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