A friend has two iMacs (10.6.5), iPad & iPhone (iOS 4.2) recently switched to gmail for his primary email service.
The problem is that not all the devices “see” the same Sent, Drafts and Trash mailbox.
Working with other IMAP services, I never see issues like this, so I know this is a gmail specific issue - there’s a disconnect between the way Gmail organizes it’s IMAP mailboxes vs. the way the Apple Mail does.
For instance, when you configure Apple Mail for a gmail IMAP account, it assumes your Sent mailbox will be called “Sent Messages”. And on the gmail web side, a Label always gets created called “Sent Messages”. My experience is that without any intervention, when you send email, it shows up in Apple Mail in the proper “Sent” mailbox, but in gmail it shows up in “Sent Messages”, NOT gmail’s Sent mailbox.
For some reason, with a gmail account, the old trick of Mailboxes > Use this Mailbox for doesn’t work because the options are grayed out.
So, how I’ve improved this situation is to open up PropertyListEditor and edit com.apple.mail.plist. There is a key called ‘MailAccounts’ under which is an “item” representing the Gmail account. Underneath, there’s an entry for ‘SentMessagesMailboxName’. I’ve tried changing this to both “Sent Mail” or “[Gmail]/Sent Mail” and both work in the sense that any email sent from Apple Mail ends up in gmail’s Sent mailbox, and NOT in “Sent Messages”
Here’s where the mystery deepens.
In my friend’s situation, when I do this, when path is set to [Gmail]/Sent Mail, I see two Sent mailboxes
in Apple Mail, I see 886 messages in the Sent under ‘Mailboxes’, and 823 in ‘Sent Mail’ under GMAIL section
in gmail, the ‘Sent Mail’ mailbox has 651 items and there exists a “[Imap]/Sent Mail” mailbox which has 609 items
When I edit the plist and change the path with PropertyListEditor to just “Sent Mail”, Apple Mail only shows one Sent mailbox with 823 messages items, but is missing the message sent within the past couple days.
Any ideas how to make sense of this?
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