Apple Mail, SSH-tunneled connections, and sent mail

[Lasse Koskela]

Hi,

I'm having a weird problem with Mail.app.

I'm connecting to a mail server (both IMAP and SMTP) over an SSH tunnel (say, localhost:143 forwards to mail.server.com:143) and I can receive and send email alright.

The problem is that the mails that I send are not getting stored on the IMAP server nor locally. Mail is also complaining that it can't save a draft. And it's not giving me any more details on what's wrong.

Where should I start looking?

[Scott Selikoff]

Don't have my mac in front of me, but I thought there were settings for it to store the mail locally... I'm surprised its not getting stored on the IMAP server, unless you're using POP3 to download and remove the messages since the default for POP3 is often to do that.

[Lasse Koskela]

Yeah, there's a checkbox in Preferences for storing sent mail on server. For some reason it's not doing that, though. And I am indeed using IMAP, not POP.

[Lasse Koskela]

Originally posted by Lasse Koskela:
Yeah, there's a checkbox in Preferences for storing sent mail on server. For some reason it's not doing that, though.

...and just to be clear, the local "Sent" and "Drafts" folders work normally when those checkboxes for storing message on server are unselected.

[Pauline McNamara]

Hi Lasse, is this still weird?

I don't use Mail.app very much but I just checked an IMAP email account that I had set up with it (and found over 300 fan letters, eh, I mean spam messages). A clueless idea: I was wondering if the setting for "Use SSL" in the advanced preferences would do anything for you?

Here's another weird idea, FWIW, independant of Mail.app and probably Macintosh or tunneling. Using Thunderbird for a different IMAP account, I didn't get my sent mails saved in the right place at first - it turned out that the name of the sent folder had to be right, and I had chosen the wrong one. Thunderbird's settings offered for me to save them in the "Sent" folder on that account, but the actual name was "Sent Items". Fortunately Thunderbird also gave an option to choose a different folder manually. I don't think I came upon that option in Mail...

[Lasse Koskela]

Originally posted by Pauline McNamara:
Hi Lasse, is this still weird?

I don't know. You tell me
But yes, it is still bothering me.

Originally posted by Pauline McNamara:
I don't use Mail.app very much but I just checked an IMAP email account that I had set up with it (and found over 300 fan letters, eh, I mean spam messages). A clueless idea: I was wondering if the setting for "Use SSL" in the advanced preferences would do anything for you?

Hmm. I don't think I can use SSL unless the mail server supports it.

Originally posted by Pauline McNamara:
Here's another weird idea, FWIW, independant of Mail.app and probably Macintosh or tunneling. Using Thunderbird for a different IMAP account, I didn't get my sent mails saved in the right place at first - it turned out that the name of the sent folder had to be right, and I had chosen the wrong one. Thunderbird's settings offered for me to save them in the "Sent" folder on that account, but the actual name was "Sent Items". Fortunately Thunderbird also gave an option to choose a different folder manually. I don't think I came upon that option in Mail...

I actually already tried creating a "Sent" folder on the IMAP server but that didn't help. I just tried "Sent Items" and "Sent Mail" as well but to no avail.

[...] (10 minute later)

I GOT IT!

In Mail.app you can select the folder you want to use for storing sent mail, and then do "Mailbox > Use This Mailbox For > Sent" in the menu.

[Pauline McNamara]

Yeeha!