Mail issues (ongoing)

In case others have similar issues and find this thread, we fixed this using a python script on the affected maildir directories on our IMAP server (exim4/dovecot but I suspect this is irrelevant). Maildir format stores each message as a file. Our script rewrites the mfile timestamp based on the sent timestamp from the message header. Force a resync and Apple mail clients read the amended timestamps and order is restored! For reference, Thunderbird still works slowly but perfectly. The faster Apple resync time is preserved, unsurprising because it’s quicker to read mfile as opposed to open message and parse header data. But Thunderbird evidently does exactly that and hence is never wrong!

All of which begs the question “how did it go wrong” in the first place? Well if bulk restore writes a load of new files (one per message) their timestamps will reflect creation date and not message date. Voilà!

So using Apple Mail to copy a local import mbox back to an IMAP server by selecting messages and dragging them may not work as expected without some server side geekery to fix up (restore) the dates. My backup came from TimeMachine. YMMV…

Now, how to make badges/ push notifications sync faster and not show incorrect unread message count, especially on slower internet connections? Don’t think python will fix this!!!

Thunderbird works perfectly. But calendars and contacts integration doesn’t seem anywhere near as tight. I’ve tried several third party IMAP mail clients, Thunderbird definitely the best.

Any recommendations for iPhone?

I have 8 IMAP mail accounts. Everything works fine apart from the sent mail on one account. This got scrambled in the sent v sent messages duality. “Moving” 7000 sent messages resulted in their disappearance so I turned to TimeMachine to restore. And that’s where the fun started. An extra iOS gotcha is a limit of 3000 messages. That just spices things up on iPhone!