Mail.app, Play Nice with IMAP Folders!
This is a little journal/tip style entry about how to get Mail.app to use normal IMAP folder names so as to not confuse your other clients on other machines (Thunderbird, etc.).
So Mail.app doesn’t know jack about subscriptions unless you know how to rub it the right way. After recently switching to IMAP I also discovered that it doesn’t like to use standardized IMAP folder names. You know, “Sent”, “Trash”, et al. If you’ve been annoyed by the inconsistency of having Mail.app trash your mail into directories you’ll never see again, or not recognize your Sent folder, you should know there’s a really simple solution.
Enter Property List Editor
Close Mail.app before editing the preferences file so it doesn’t overwrite the settings. You need to restart the app anyway, so shut it down now. I also suggest backing up the file if you’re not used to editing .plist files
- Open up ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist with the Property List Editor
- Navigate to the key named MailAccounts and open it up
- In it are all your accounts indexed as 0, 1, 2, …
- Find your IMAP accounts (check that the key AccountType is IMAPAccount)
- Navigate to the keys SentMessagesMailboxName and TrashMailboxName and change them to Sent and Trash respectively
Voila, you’re all set. Save the plist file and start up Mail.app, it should now use the proper special folders (the real Trash folder, etc.) and the IMAP folders should disappear from the sidebar. Now when you delete something, it will actually go to your IMAP trash!
