IMAP oddity

[jamesrob]

Please try your attachments again.
Note they must not be bigger then 8M.

OK, here goes:

sonic sent messages.PNG (198.27 KiB) Viewed 2481 times

[jamesrob]

sonic email acc't-2.PNG (153.72 KiB) Viewed 2481 times

sonic email acc't-1.PNG (152.95 KiB) Viewed 2481 times

sonic.net sent mail is different on the iPad; Sent mail, drafts, Trash are subfolders of the Inbox:

[jamesrob]

Traffic on the topic stopped here without suggestions for a fix, but I'd like to make it clear that with LOTS of effort, sonic telephone and email tech support were able to get me synchronized between Macs and sonic's webmail, with the "special" folders correctly mapped on the webmail interface as well. It took a rather surprising amount of work to get it done, and I've not tried again to get IMAP mail back on my iPAD2, but may do so today; alternatively, I may just wait until iOS 6 comes out just in case it introduces new wrinkles.

[dane]

"Lots" sounds complicated. Can you summarize what the issue was and how it was resolved?

[jamesrob]

I'll try: The Mac OS names it's "Special Folder" for sent messages as "Sent", but if it doesn't find a folder to map to on the IMAP server, it creates one, as a subfolder of "Inbox" and names it "Sent Messages." I read your own blog post regarding iOS and didn't glean that from it, so mapping folders on the Mac and the Web interface created problems.

Second, the web interface has problems displaying messages by date sent or received. There are 47 pages of "Sent" messages in my Web interface. I could choose to view them, apparently, by "newest first", but when I was having troubles, some of my new messages just wouldn't be visible at all (turns out they were on Page 47).

Third, I couldn't get mapping to the Mac's "special folders" without adding "INBOX" (without the quotes, of course) to the IMAP Path Prefix data entry field in advanced preferences in Mail.app. I didn't need to do this for any other IMAP account other than sonic's.

Also, when I was working with tech support trading emails, I was concerned at one point that some of my sent messages had disappeared from the server. They were visible on both my Macs but (as noted above) couldn't be found in webmail because of its very odd sorting (which I think must be a bug). The tech support person I was working with somehow concluded that these sent messages, because not visible in webmail, must have somehow become archived in local folders on the Mac. To test this, I created an IMAP account in Windows Outlook 2007. That account brought in all my
"Sent" messages and reassured me that they were still on the server, but it took some time for either me or the sonic tech support person to realize that sorting was for some reason far from linear in the webmail interface.

Once along the way I emptied one of the "Sent Messages" subfolders on the Mac into the "Sent" "special folder" and deleted the "Sent Messages" folder that was now empty. The temporary result of this was all those messages seeming to disappear. They hadn't, but something had confused the mapping between server and Mac, and the Mac had just recreated a "Sent Messages" subfolder on the Mac.

I've not been brave enough to bring the iPad back into the mix yet. Since iOS 6 is imminent I'll see what others' experiences with that are like before trying.

Jim Robertson