imap folders not syncing in an new BigSur installation

Question

imap folders not syncing in an new BigSur installation

I'd been Apple Mail application for my different mail accounts for several years, Office365, Gmail, and an internal company IMAP server.

On our internal server, I keep a structure of several folders to store the mails and this has been working in diffferent laptops and OS versions in the last years. but recently I'd changed my Macbook and upgraded the System to BigSur and when I tried to download and sync the mail only the INBOX folder is downloaded.

The other accounts (gmail, office365 show the folders inside the server, but our internal server only shows the inbox, sent, draft, and so on.

The debug of the mail apps show that the folders are listed in the initial connection, but later the mails are not downloaded, below are the logs that show that the server sent the list of folders.

Mail.app log

Is there any option to force the rescanning and download of all the server folders?

thanks

paco

MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

Posted on Feb 25, 2021 3:24 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,120 points

Feb 25, 2021 5:50 AM in response to francisco.monserrat

It could be you need a different IMAP Path Prefix entered for the account.

It may be set to INBOX, but needs to be blank.

You configure it in Accounts tab of Mail Preferences.

Select your account, then Server Settings.

Click the Advanced IMAP Settings button.

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Answer 2

Mar 1, 2021 9:31 AM in response to francisco.monserrat

The problem seems to happen when the IMAP account is big (>20gb) and the IMAP server is a Zimbra collaboration suite. I'd deleted the account information from the settings in Mail several times, removed the ~/Library/Mail/V8 folder, and tried other things, but with little success, but finally, I think that I'd found a dirty fix.

I'd realized that I don't have a "Sent" folder for this account but Mail.app recognized the Sent folder in the server (outside the inbox folder), so I'd send a test email. After sending the mail Mail.app has "created" the folder, (surely has failed in the server as the folder already exists), but after this, the Sent emails have started to synchronize between Mail and the server.

I'd tried with another folder already in the server, I'd manually created the folder in the right place in the email hierarchy in the Mail.app folder and the mails have started to appear in the application, unfortunately, if you have subfolders you need to manually create them in Mail.app again).

So in short: (re)creating the folder structure in the Mail.app seems to force the synchronization of folders and the mails starts to download to the Application.

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Answer 3

Feb 25, 2021 1:19 PM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks,

I'd already tried with an empty map path and also with "/" , but the result is the same, only the inbox folder is downloaded

regards

paco

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imap folders not syncing in an new BigSur installation

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