In my previous blog entry I said that you don't have to mess with the Mail.app preferences for IMAP support to work properly.
Turns out this is not really the case. If you're on an IMAP server you need to go to Preferences -> Accounts -> Advanced and put "INBOX" (without the quotes) in the "IMAP Path Prefix" field.
The difference in behavior between 10.3 Mail.app and 10.4 is that in 10.3, your IMAP folders would not show up at all. In 10.4 they show up as subfolders of Inbox, and everything appears to work.
My clue that something was not right happened when I was typing a long message and Mail.app tried to save a copy in the Drafts folder and failed. Changing the IMAP Path Prefix put all of my folder structure outside of the Inbox, and now all appears to be fine.
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IMAP Settings
In response to your experience with Linux...My Mac Mail 10.3 IMAP worked fine on Panther/Red Hat Linux Server. Now that I have upgraded to Tiger, things seem to be a bit more erratic. My path prefix has always been "/mail"
I did see all of my mail folders when I synced with the server. My main problem now is that I do not seem to be writing to my sent mail correctly...at least I cannot see any messages in "sent". As well, I seem to have some odd "drafts" behavior. Everytime I start a message, Mail puts a copy in drafts at various points in the message creation. For example, if I make a new message then answer the phone, there is a draft. If I then return to the message and type a paragraph and go to lunch there is another draft. I sometimes end up with as many as 40 drafts of one singlee message at various points in its composition.
Thoughts?
IMAP Settings
It depends on the type of server. RowNetCom is using the University of Washington IMAP server, Robert uses the Cyrus IMAP server. As far as the personal folders are concerned, both are right. However, Apples IMAP implementation still is seriously broken, as it cannot work with a namespace for public folders. In the IMAP world, there are several prefixes, one for personal folders, one for public folders, and one for folders of other users to which one may have access. Apple engineers have completely missed that point by providing only room for a single prefix. Just look at how Thunderbird handles that: three different prefix fields.
IMAP Settings
While I doon't have 10.4, the information for IMAP given above may not be entirely correct. I use IMAP very successfully in 10.3 Mail.app and my folders show up just fine. In my case, my IMAP folders are set up in preferences as a path prefix of "~/mail" the location on my server home directory.
Additionally, my folders are not sub folders of my inbox, but are listed properly under the IMAP Server folder. I'm using the IMAP server that generally comes with Redhat linux.
I understand certain IMAP servers will use different folder structures, so setting your path is critical to getting it to work right. Just be sure that 10.3 Mail and I'm sure 10.4 Mail should work and display things correctly if the Prefix path is set according to your network IMAP server configuration.