I've written at length about how to move from POP to IMAP on Apple Mail. This is an update on how to improve your experience with IMAP on Apple Mail.
A tendency to multiply outgoing draft messages is the most irritating characteristic of Apple Mail IMAP. Sometimes they expand to 25 versions of the same outgoing message. You don't want to delete the most recent one but you do have to stomp them out like weeds, sometimes several times per day. Due to this issue, I was considering moving back to POP. There are no settings on the server or in your account settings which seem to cure this trait.
Apple Mail IMAP draft messages
Fortunately there is one clever workaround. Stop using IMAP for your drafts. If you set Apple Mail to save your drafts locally, they don't proliferate. There is a significant disadvantage. Any drafts which you have locally will not be available on your other computers.
For me, the absence of drafts across my secondary computers is a price worth paying to not have drafts proliferating like rabbits on my main computer* all day every day.
* A Macbook Air 11" 1.6 GHz 4GB these days: the Macbook Air is holding up well under stress apart from the 4GB of memory which is very tight in a busy Safari sessions with photo editing in the background when one is writing web log posts. Like now for instance.
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Apple Mail: Migrating from POP to IMAP Smoothly for Power Users
Thank you so much, this has been driving me mad since I moved from POP to IMAP. Rabbit drafts be gone!
Agree! Life saver. Thanks for the tip.
thx. very helpful
You have saved my sanity. Thank you!
Great tip thanks!
Awesome tip!! Thanks a ton.
Thank you for the solution to this problem posted by Alec. It’s one of the very few times I’ve located a viable solution to a problem.
Thanks again.
Tom
Hi Tom,
Glad I could help.
One thing I’ve done which has drastically reduced the time I waste tweaking my computer (and actually allows me to run four of them with less hassle than one used to cost me) is to stop upgrading.
All my Apple computers are on Snow Leopard (and all the company computers are on Leopard). Each new version of Apple software brings a whole new generation of bugs and inconveniences. When you are no longer shooting at a moving target, with stable application versions, life gets much, much better.
I don’t like the changes or new features of Lion or Mountain Lion. As Apple requires you to use the current OS version on new hardware, they’ve just outsmarted themselves out of about five computers sales/year (two for me, another three for Foliovision).
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Thanks for the great tip! I don’t recall drafts being saved on the server in the past, but perhaps they were. In any case, the problem is now gone. The multiple drafts seemed to increase like crazy in only a few minutes of editing.
No longer saving IMAP drafts on the server works, but, why has this bug been in there for at least almost two years now? Third-party applications (like Sparrow) don’t suffer from this nasty proliferating bug.
Thanks for the tip – much appreciated
Thank you so much — this problem has been driving me up the wall for months!
Thanks for passing along this simple preference setting. It was driving me nutso!
So, do I click or unclick this? As my configuration is currently unclicked and I’m getting draft after draft after draft saved in my “smart folders”
I wish Apple/Gmail would just fix this stupid glitch. Otherwise I love their mail client…
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