Previously, on The Sarth Repository…
So Google finally enabled IMAP for my accounts on thallos.org, which allowed me to test a new strategy for archiving sent mail. Again, the goal is to have a copy archived straight from Entourage, whenever I send a new email, to my mail repository. With proper IMAP access, however, this became much easier…In fact, this is the exact same approach if you were backing up to an IMAP-enabled mail server.
And now, the continuation…
So that turned out to be too good to be true.
The metadata after the copy is slightly mangled. While it does show up in Gmail’s Sent Mail box, the To field in the Sent box view is marked “To: me” instead of to the actual recipient. The source message remains OK – so the actual text in the message has not been damaged, simply that Gmail doesn’t display it correctly.
Received date is also mangled. It shows arrival time as the time of the backup, not of the actual message received date. Even though the source of the message appears to have the date intact.
This, unfortunately, renders the entire exercise rather pointless.
In the meanwhile, gritting my teeth, I contemplated the switch to Apple Mail. It would be horrifyingly annoying, but I’ve got some break time coming up to use on timewasting things. Unfortunately, the Tiger version of Mail.app does not work either. It has auto-BCC, but the value of that field is fixed to “myself”, as in the same account that is being used to send the message. Rather typical of Apple, really, to not design for any other use case besides the obvious ones. Do UI designers actually get paid for removing options from the UI? I mean, you have set up this architecture for auto-BCC, and you manage to automagically detect which account I’ve chosen to send that particular message from, which is far more complicated. Why not give me the option to pick which account to auto-BCC?
Of the lot, only Mozilla Thunderbird covers the auto-BCC to X accounts option. If it weren’t so, well, terrible on OS X, I’d consider switching.
Unless the Entourage team implements “Always-BCC”, I’m out of luck again. Perhaps in the next version. I’m sticking with Tiger more or less solely for the reason of keeping Classic and Heroes of Might and Magic III, neither of which would operate under Leopard. If Leopard has a Mail.app that doesn’t presume to know where I want to archive my mail, however, I would also consider upgrading.
