Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with applemail

You've Got Too Much Mail

bonsai forest — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:43:28 -0800

I am helping a friend who just got a mac set up their computer. They use gmail and I wanted to set up his macmail to get his emails from his gmail account, but when i had the mail account "auto set-up" it began grabbing ALL his emails from his gmail account, and he has more than 10,000 and a great many with large attachments. We quit program, and now when we restart, it still tries to get all of these emails. So my question is: How do we stop this? If it grabs a 100 or so of the newest emails, that would be fine, but mac mail is trying to grab everything, starting from 2006, and that is unacceptable to my friend.

A second question, is: how do we guarantee macmail doesn't try to delete his gmail emails after grabbing them?

The Perfect Mail Client

tejolote — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:28:57 -0800

I switched to mac recently, and hate applemail. I don't think thunderbird will do everything I want, at least it didn't a few years ago. I want something like Pocomail, easily scriptable and enhanceable, and perfectly reliable (and easy and standard enough for me to fix on me own when there are problems). But Pocomail doesn't have a client for macs.

Also, I am going to have to gamble that whatever I pick will keep being updated and maintained over the years. I have a lot of mail and I really hate to move it around. In fact (I have some mail I've been unable to get to after a year now, but that's another question altogether).

Suggest mail applications for mac, preferably with some of the suggested parameters! Help me get to read (and sort) my vast tracts of mail.

Better Visibility of Apple Mail's Flagged Mail

gkhewitt — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 06:40:01 -0800

Can I get a list of all my flagged e-mails from Apple Mail to appear somewhere more visible? I've been a Mac user for nearly two years now, and one thing has been bugging me for a while now.

I use Apple's Mail client with GMail and if I get an important e-mail that requires attention at some point, I'll flag it. However, depending on the volume of e-mail that I deal with, the flagged stuff can often get lost. And, using GMail, I have to manually go into the 'starred' folder in order to see all the mail that I've flagged.

What would be ideal - a desktop or dashboard widget that can display a list of all e-mail that has been flagged.

Essentially, I just need to be able to have more visibility of the flagged mails, as I can become very forgetful! I've already trawled Google looking for Applescripts and so forth that can do this, with no avail. I'm not an Applescript guru so don't even know if it's possible?

Many thanks for any help!

osx applemail imap mbox emlx duplicate emails email messages

DLWM — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 06:33:51 -0800

If I make changes using a command-line utility to an mbox file that is the local cache of an IMAP account, how can I get those changes uploaded to the server? (Mac OS X 10.4, Mail.app, Perl script.) I use Mail.app for my Gmail and work email, both of which use IMAP. I have a local cache of everything that gets synced when I'm connected to the internet.

I have a bunch of duplicate messages within both of these accounts. I found a Perl script that will go through all the emlx files in each local mbox directory (i.e., the local cache) and delete dupes. But I'm thinking that when I connect again and Mail.app sees that there's a bunch of messages on the server that aren't in my local cache, it'll just download them again.

How can I get Mail.app to tell the servers that the messages that are missing on the local copy should be deleted from the server copy, too?

I've tried using this AppleScript that deletes the messages within Mail.app, but it's way to slow on my machine. The command-line Perl script is so much faster.

Mac Address Book to Microsoft Excel?

bibbit — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 06:08:45 -0800

My main computer is a Mac (iBook) and I use the Address Book and Apple Mail. I also manage the email list for a group, and I need to be able to export the list of email addresses to either Excel (preferably) or Word. I haven't figured out how to do that. The contacts are all separate addresses in my Address Book (people come and go on the list so I need to be able to find and delete people easily). I need to send the whole list of email addresses to people using PCs often enough that I'm willing to buy a program to help me to do this if necessary.

In other words, how do I get a list of email addresses off Address Book and into Excel, Word, or some program where I can easily translate the email addresses into Excel or Word?

How do I get Apple Mail to stop re-caching my messages all the time?

mkultra — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 05:34:31 -0800

Apple Mail keeps re-caching my messages... I use Google Apps for domains for my email, which is basically the Gmail engine. I've got 2 computers polling the same account via IMAP, both on 10.5.4- my laptop is fine, but my desktop is always Caching my messages over and over (I can see this in the activity window). In addition to having a lot of disk churn, it's eating up crazy space on my Time Machine every day. The desktop has this problem whether the laptop is on or not, so I'm pretty sure it's not some odd race condition with flagging messages.

What gives? I've tried deleting and re-creating the account, but I can't figure out which file holds the actual headers (when I re-create the account, the message list comes back immediately, intact)?

Bonus question- how do I selectively remove my recent mail message backups from Time Machine? It's about 100G I'd like to reclaim.

Web Page E-mail Links That Don't Work: Bug or Feature?

BrooklynCouch — Mon, 26 May 2008 18:53:04 -0800

Web Page E-mail Links That Don't Work: Bug or Feature? Greetings Mefi-World! Here on my Mac OS X Panther PowerBook, nothing happens when I click on e-mail links on any web page in Safari and Firefox. Is this a feature I need to turn on, or is this intentional; an anti-spam thing? If it's the former, what do I change to make clicking on these links open a new e-mail (in Apple Mail)? All suggestions appreciated greatly.

Apple Mail Address Woes

alitorbati — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:24:08 -0800

How do you get rid of unwanted email address that appear when sending a message in Apple Mail? This is a picture of what I want to delete. As far as I can tell, there is no way to get rid of the addresses.

Apple Mail and iSync - can they tame the beast?

Capri — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 04:40:54 -0800

I want my email messages to be in the same state (read, deleted, filed, sent) on three different Macintoshes. Will iSync do what I want? Is there another solution to the chaos? I have three Macintoshes, all running Leopard. I have three email accounts, two IMAP (Gmail and .Mac) and one POP (my own domain, hosted by GoDaddy). The POP is my primary account, and the two IMAPs are used maybe 5% of the time. I've set the POP account to keep messages on the server for a week after retrieval.

I use Apple Mail for all three accounts, and mail from each account comes into my Inbox. I have a large complex hierarchy of folders on my Mac that I put messages into.

The problem is that when I receive, read, and either file or delete a message from my POP account on one computer, it has no effect on the message on the other two computers. So if I don't boot up one of the computers for a week or so, when I do finally boot that one up, I get 500 new messages -- all of which I've already dealt with on one of my other computers. I want all three of my computers to by synched so that I don't have to deal with each message three separate times. Also, any mail sent from one computer appears only in that computer's sent box; I can't access it from the other two computers.

By contrast, if I delete a message from an IMAP account, it disappears from all three computers (this is good). The same works for sent messages - they appear in the Sent box of all three computers. But if I file a message on one computer, it disappears from the other two. This is not good - I want it filed on all three computers in the same folder.

(I recognize that this is the way POP and IMAP accounts work; none of what I've just said surprises me.)

What can I do so that all three computers have the same messages in the inbox, the sent box, and each of the folders in the hierarchy?

I tried using iSync, but it didn't seem to do anything; I am not sure if I set it up correctly. If I convert my POP account to IMAP, and then move a message from my Inbox to a folder on my Mac, or send a message from one computer, could I get iSync to make a copy of it to the same folder on a different Mac so that I can still access that message on my other two computers?

Also, I sort of like having a web-based way to get to my email (and having my old emails there, even if they're all unread and in the inbox) for those rare occasions when I am using someone else's computer. But this is a much lower priority than just wrangling my new messages into control.

Thanks so much. This is all rather overwhelming, and I just can't find a way to make it all manageable.

Help me open an Apple Mail attachment on my Windows PC.

analogue — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 11:16:21 -0800

Help me open an Apple Mail attachment on my Windows PC. OK, a bunch of you are going to think that this has been answered before, but to the best of my ability I could not find a pointer to this exact problem.

I have a super important E-mail attachment which I received from a Apple user who used Apple Mail. The attachment arrived in my gmail as "noname" when really it should have been "proposal.doc". I've tried opening this attachment both on a Mac and a PC and both just show it as:

--Apple-Mail-10-226900443
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: application/applefile;
name=proposal.doc
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="proposal.doc"

AAUWBwACAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMAAAAJAAAAPgAAAAoAAAADAAAASAAAAB0AAAACAAAA
ZQAAAR5XOEJOTVNXRAAAUGxhc3RpYyBTdGFyZmlzaCBwcm9wb3NhbC5kb2MAAAEAAAABAAAAAAAA
AAAeAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAAAQAAAAAAAAAAHgB209gCbAAAABwAHv//

--Apple-Mail-10-226900443
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Id:
Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
x-mac-type=5738424E;
x-unix-mode=0644;
x-mac-creator=4D535744;
name=proposal.doc
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="proposal.doc"

0M8R4KGxGuEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPgADAP7/CQAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAAbwAAAAAAAAAA.. (tons of garbage)...

--Apple-Mail-10-226900443--

Now, I've tried a bunch of stuff before resorting to askmefi. I've tried saving the file locally and renaming it. I've tried stripping the first part of the encoding (the Windows friendly fix thing, but that still didn't work and that wasn't the problem in the first place because I couldn't the file on a Mac either). I just don't know what else to try, but I'm desperate because without this attachment I lose a full day of productivity.

How do I set a default adress for a contact in mail.app?

nbrier — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:08:22 -0800

How do I change the default address that comes up when I type someone's name in Apple Mail.app? I can't be the only person with this problem (in fact I know I'm not). Every so often someone's secondary email starts to come up first when I type their name in mail.app (for instance I'm trying to write someone at work and it goes to their home address).

Is there any way to fix this and set the default address for a contact?

Need help importing old emails to Apple Mail

valleys — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 05:06:37 -0800

How do I get Apple Mail to correctly import multiple emails with the same subject header? I have about 50 archived emails with the subject header of 'Hey' from a bunch of different people. Apple Mail is doing a fine job of mixing them all together even though I've set it up to sort mail by date. For some reason it's ignoring the dates and lumping all the 'hey' mails together. Right in the middle of my 2007 mail I have a conversation with the same subject header from 2005.

How do I fix this?

My Mac won't let anything but Safari connect to the internet. Help. Might pull out hair.

deinemutti — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 19:26:41 -0800

My Mac won't let anything but Safari connect to the internet. Help. Might pull out hair. I got an iMac about 1 1/2 months ago. Everything connected fine until a week ago. But the honeymoon's over, there's enough problems now to write a list:

-The Apple Mail program will not connect with my IMAP account, saying "The connection to the server (w/ my proper domain address) on port 993 failed (error 1: Operation not permitted). I cannot receive e-mails and sometime I can send them if I fiddle with the port numbers, but this hasn't worked. I also tried purging my mailbox on the server itself, deleted the account and added it in again.
It works just fine with my other Gmail account. I have already called Apple tech support and the support line for my IMAP e-mail provider, both couldn't figure out what's causing the problem. I have also scoured Apple's message board and Ask MeFi for the last week trying anything, nothing has worked so far.

-Other applications that aren't Safari won't connect.
Everytime I've loaded Firefox I get "Unable to Connect." You won't believe how many times uninstalled and re-installed this to get it to work, and failed. Ditto with Camino.

AOL Instant Messenger also doesn't wish to connect "An unknown socket error occurred: 504, 1"

Included non-connecting programs are Solarseek and Adobe downloader.

I'm beginning to wonder if it's a program I installed and then (thought) I deleted completely called GlowWorm, a firewall/internet traffic monitor program, that is playing a role. It's no longer in my apps folder, but when I hit search in finder the files are still there and they won't let me trash them properly.

I hope this all makes sense, since these issues are slowly driving me into madness. Please excuse any gaps in spelling, grammar or sheer incoherence.

Where are my e-mails?

purplefiber — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 16:30:15 -0800

Apple Mail has suddenly stopped retrieving my messages... I have Apple Mail set up to receive messages from several gmail accounts and a hotmail account. This has always worked with no problems, but for some reason on Tuesday it stopped receiving messages from all but one account. I am able to read my messages by using Gmail in my web browser, but this is very frustrating since I use Apple Mail to categorize and store e-mails. I tried Connection Doctor, and tried changing/updating my passwords... no success. Has anyone experienced this? I especially can't understand why ONE account still works.
Thanks!

archive my apple mail mailboxes?

subpixel — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 12:19:56 -0800

is there anything like this available for apple mail? i need a way to archive my huge mailboxes so i can search them later...

Mail.app/IMAP: Prior Day's E-Mails Unfile, Dupe, and Unfilter Themselves?

rustcellar — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 19:28:45 -0800

Weird Apple Mail/IMAP Problem: When I wake up in the morning, I often observe that the following has happened: all the emails that arrived in my Inbox the previous day, which I duly filed away in appropriate folders, have appeared again in my Inbox, so now I have TWO copies of each. More bizarrely, my filters have not been applied, and many emails which usually get routed right away to their own folders are still in my Inbox. What's going on? Oh, one more note: these new messages are marked unread, as are any actual new mail I might have received, and the main reason this is a problem is that it's a pain to sort out the new from the old.

Help me choose the best web browser

Alylex — Sun, 04 Jul 2004 22:31:35 -0800

Mozilla? Firefox? Camino? I'm ready to try a new browser, but I'm confused by the differences between these three. Currently using Safari 1.2.2 on an iMac and an iBook, both with 10.3.4. I have a license for Opera, but it's simply more than I need. I don't need IRC and I don't need HTML (yet?). I would like for it to sync bookmarks between the 2 Macs (I have iSync and a .mac account) and to work reasonably well with AppleMail, Address Book, etc. What's the best choice for a non-geeky girl?