BBoards using Mail.app
A friend of mine working closely with Carnegie Mellon’s Computing Services let me in on what appears to be a rather well-kept secret about reading the bboards sanely using Apple’s Mail.app. I say sanely because Mail.app doesn’t actually have a problem reading bboards; with your IMAP prefix set to nothing at all, Mail.app will happily download all of the bboards you want. The problem is that it can’t seem to find out exactly which bboards you want so it downloads every single one. This kills just about everything on your computer while your network usage skyrockets, your disk space shrinks rapidly, Mail.app tries to apply all of your mail filters, and Spotlight tries to catalog each message.
The solution, as it turns out, is a hack put in by the software authors (who happen to work for Carnegie Mellon) just for Apple’s Mail.app. You put a “+” after your username and then get rid of the “INBOX” IMAP prefix. It might take a restart of Mail.app, but soon thereafter it should be getting a list of your subscribed bboards by default and displaying them nicely in the folder bar.
Julian‘s constructive criticism:
Jesus. Why couldn’t they just make it default to doing that??
I'm Eli.
May 7th, 2006 at 11:17 pm
if i still had any reason to read andrew bboards, this would rock
May 8th, 2006 at 12:05 am
The “Jesus” being because I’ve basically spent four years trying to find a solution
May 11th, 2006 at 12:44 am
shit i’ve been wondering how to do this so long! you actually have a usefull blog eli! glad i read it
too bad i’m graduating
May 12th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
Eli-
So when you send a message after configuring this, where does Mail put the sent message if you’ve checked “Store sent messages on server.”
Thx.
Carl
May 12th, 2006 at 8:30 pm
Carl said:
Mail.app will put all of the messages you send to the server into the same folder because it has no idea that the server will handle “post+cmu.misc.market@andrew.cmu.edu” differently that it’ll treat “egwynn@andrew.cmu.edu”. To Mail.app, the process goes like this:
1. Write a message
2. Send it to the server to be delivered
3. Store it on the server in the-place-where-the-user’s-sent-stuff-gets-stored
So on my Mail.app, I set the “Sent Mail” folder on IMAP to be the folder used for sent mail by Mail.app. All mail that gets sent from my andrew ID through Mail.app gets stored there.
May 13th, 2006 at 10:27 am
ah, great…
i see…i hadn’t yet set my sent mail folder in Mail.app using the “Use This Mailbox For…” command. all good now, though. thanks for the tip.
May 15th, 2006 at 1:44 am
dude, same response – would’ve been great if I weren’t graduating. They should put it up somewhere on the myandrew page!
June 13th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
FYI, this hack is also useful for other mis-behaved IMAP clients, such as Sylpheed.