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Mild annoyance
7/9/06
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Sunday, July 9, 2006
I noticed a couple of things that I didn't really pay much attention to at first, but which I later began to wonder about. For the record, I'm using OS X's Mail.app to access my aol.com account using IMAP. Here's what I noticed:
1. Messages in my "Sent Items" folder were showing up as unread mail until I went in there and either read them, or just selected them and marked them as read.
2. When I viewed that folder, Mail.app showed me who the messages were from (which is always me -- not very helpful information), rather than who they were sent to.
After a moment's thought, it dawned on me why this is (and that's a lot faster than I normally figure stuff out). It's because Mail.app has no idea that this folder is for stuff I sent out to others, so it doesn't treat it as a sent mail folder.
For those not familiar with AOL's SMTP and IMAP service (raise your hand if you didn't even know we had an IMAP service; we do -- looky here), when you send an email out there is no reason for your mail client to append a copy of the message to a "Sent" folder. The mail system does this for you automatically on the server. The downside, though, is that your mail client doesn't know those are sent messages. As far as it's concerned, "Sent Items" is just another IMAP folder that mail sometimes appears in as if by magic.
No big deal. I solved issue #1 by setting up a rule that all mail that was from my address should be automatically marked as read. I would have preferred to just set that rule on any message that shows up in that folder, but it didn't look like Mail.app had a way for me to do that.
Issue #2 was only slightly trickier. It turns out that in Mail.app, that little row of buttons that defines which columns are shown, and by which you can sort your messages (and that, as an aside, contains several buttons with completely incomprehensible icons and no tooltips to tell you what sorts of nefarious things might happen if you click them) is editable. Right-click (or Ctrl+click if you're still using a 1-button mouse) on it, and you can choose which columns to show. I de-selected "From" and selected "To", and voila - my Sent Items folder now looks, acts, walks, and quacks like a sent mail folder. Spiffy.
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Mild annoyance
1. Messages in my "Sent Items" folder were showing up as unread mail until I went in there and either read them, or just selected them and marked them as read.
2. When I viewed that folder, Mail.app showed me who the messages were from (which is always me -- not very helpful information), rather than who they were sent to.
After a moment's thought, it dawned on me why this is (and that's a lot faster than I normally figure stuff out). It's because Mail.app has no idea that this folder is for stuff I sent out to others, so it doesn't treat it as a sent mail folder.
For those not familiar with AOL's SMTP and IMAP service (raise your hand if you didn't even know we had an IMAP service; we do -- looky here), when you send an email out there is no reason for your mail client to append a copy of the message to a "Sent" folder. The mail system does this for you automatically on the server. The downside, though, is that your mail client doesn't know those are sent messages. As far as it's concerned, "Sent Items" is just another IMAP folder that mail sometimes appears in as if by magic.
No big deal. I solved issue #1 by setting up a rule that all mail that was from my address should be automatically marked as read. I would have preferred to just set that rule on any message that shows up in that folder, but it didn't look like Mail.app had a way for me to do that.
Issue #2 was only slightly trickier. It turns out that in Mail.app, that little row of buttons that defines which columns are shown, and by which you can sort your messages (and that, as an aside, contains several buttons with completely incomprehensible icons and no tooltips to tell you what sorts of nefarious things might happen if you click them) is editable. Right-click (or Ctrl+click if you're still using a 1-button mouse) on it, and you can choose which columns to show. I de-selected "From" and selected "To", and voila - my Sent Items folder now looks, acts, walks, and quacks like a sent mail folder. Spiffy.
kocik01 at 1:00:00 AM EDT Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | digg this
