So, I’ve been playing more with Apple’s Mail.app... mainly because something I’d consider vital decided to break itself on me...

You see, my normal gmail account, when configured in Mail.app, would cause Mail to crash. Hard. And it didn’t matter if I removed all of my Mail preferences and started from scratch, or even if I nuked and re-created my OS X user account.

If I ‘trick’ Mail.app into treating Gmail as a normal IMAP (vs. the usual “Gmail IMAP”), it works. To trick it, I simply tell Mail (in its account settings) that the email address is... well... anything other than @gmail.com. If I add @gmail.com, mail crashes after a couple of seconds (as it tries to sync up account information...)

But the other cool thing I’ve discovered: They’ve finally added the ability to tell Mail to leave the actual message on the server, and only download the headers. Sure, you can’t access the email when you’re not online... but you know what? That’s close enough to never for me to make it a non-issue. The other downside is less efficient email searching (which I can live with). As long as I don’t have Mail.app caching 8 GB of GMail... now I can finally put my mailing list account into Mail.app (and turn the caching off for that account), and not worry about it taking up massive amounts of space.

Now if only I could figure out why I have to trick Mail.app to use my normal Gmail account... without crashing, that is...

Tags: Apple, Computing, Google