fsync(2)

I still use Mac OS X Leopard at work, but I have Snow Leopard at home. I am not sure when I noticed, but both machines did not see the same To Do items for my work email account that I access over IMAP. At one point my work client hung so bad that I had to go in and start deleting some files it stores in ~/Library/Mail, so that might have caused the problem – though I still would classify this as an Apple bug in the first place. I noticed that my client at home saw a new folder with a name like “ToDos.mbox”, but the work client did not. I looked at the files and they both contained To Do data.

First I thought that the name of the To Dos IMAP folder changed between versions of Apple Mail, but it’s not like you can tell from Apple Mail preferences (I guess we can’t be trusted to configure something so advanced or anything). I did some searching and figured out how to change the folder name that Apple Mail uses to find To Dos in mail accounts. First, open the Apple Mail preferences file:

open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

The property list editor can be used to navigate to Roots –> MailAccounts, which will show a number of entries starting at “0″ for different accounts:

Apple Mail Preferences

Navigating down further in each mail account, look for entries with ToDosMailboxName set. You can set it to the default “Apple Mail To Do” if you wish (that’s what I suggest):

Apple Mail To Do IMAP Preference

Note that I did not prefix that with “Mail/” like the other folder in the image. I store my IMAP mail folders in ~/Mail on the server. Apparently this does not matter. In any case, this solved my problem. The Apple Mail preferences should allow you to set this IMO, but that’s not going to stop me from using it because of its integration into iCal. I do have to say that Thunderbird 3.0 does look nice however :-)