I haven't been able to find anything with Google yet. I've been using IMAP for a long time now with a few of my email accounts. Everything had been going smoothly until last week sometime when I updated my Mac to Lion (new mail program) and added the Sparrow email client on my iPhone.

The current issue is that I've deleted some unused IMAP folders, but they keep coming back. One per account, that I created in the first place. ie. they are not part of the basic list of standard folders (inbox, sent, etc..)

I have deleted them using the Mac mail client and confirmed they disappeared from the server by checking the IMAP folder list with Sparrow and SquirrelMail (web mail at the host). I have deleted the mailboxes with SquirrelMail and then confirmed they disappeared from the Mac (and Sparrow). I have quit the Mac's mail program, manually deleted the folders from disk and in SuirrelMail.

They're gone for days and then one day I flip back to the Mac's mail program and there they are again.

Particulars: The folders are both named "Older" and it's where I would toss older mail. Essentially an archive folder. When I installed Sparrow it didn't start up with the correct folder assignments and didn't ask me up front. So it went ahead and created an Archive folder and some other folders which were duplicates of Sent, Drafts. etc. I fixed up all the assignments and decided that I would use "Archive" in place of my custom 'Older' folder since it was officially recognized by Sparrow and my Mac's email program as "special" with a nice color icon.

So I moved the desired messages into the Archive folders, made sure they were being used for their purpose and confirmed the "Older" folders were empty. Then I deleted them. Again and again over the past 1.5 weeks.

I have no idea how they're coming back. Whether it's something on the server re-creating them or if it's the Mac mail program doing it. Or even Sparrow on iOS. I haven't been able to pinpoint a trigger/action yet that causes it to happen. I just see them at what seems like a random time when I switch over to check my email on the Mac.

Is there a .subscription file on the server that you need to update ?

The colour icon attached to the Archive folder sounds suspicious. Surely that can't be based on the name, so maybe one of the clients has an option hidden away linking Archive to Older ?

Some other old computer lying around somewhere, left on or turned on only occasionally, that is logged into the account automatically?

There's definitely no hidden option linking Archive to Older in any of the clients. The Archive folder only appeared after installing Sparrow and was already set to its default Archiving folder. The other clients don't have the ability to set an archive folder assignment like their do for inbox, trash, draft, sent.

When I look at folders using iOS default Mail app that's where I can see that it has a special "archive" image instead of a generic folder image that any random folder would have.

I'm going to try accessing the server with SSH to look for a .subscription file and I think I'll also remove Sparrow from my phone and re-install it at a later time. That way I can take it out of the loop completely while I test.

And for Tony, nope, I don't have any other machines configured to access these accounts - only the iPhone and Mac.

Here are a couple of interesting points (or maybe not).

I renamed the two "Older" folders on my Mac a few hours ago. I just checked Sparrow on the iPhone and it showed I now had the renamed folders AND the originals. The same was reflected on my Mac.

So within the past few hours, after renaming the folders, new folders were created magically with the old names.

I've now removed Sparrow from the iPhone and deleted the folders using iOS default Mail app. Within a minute of doing this, my Mac's Mail reflected the change, the folders were gone. I checked the Mail folder inside my Library folder on disk and the "Older" references were gone from there as well. Confirmed with SquirrelMail web mail and the folders are not showing up there either.

Now we wait again to see what happens... Meanwhile time to try ssh...

It has to be (or have been) Sparrow. Since removing it all folders have been stable and nothing unexpected has happened.

Spoke too soon. This AM the "other" folders are back and I haven't re-installed Sparrow.

This issue is still not solved and I now have Dreamhost support staff helping out.

They've unsubscribed on the server, deleted the mailbox on the server, I've deleted it on my client, gone and edited config files on the client to remove subscriptions and all mentioned I could find in any pref file, unsubscribed from webmail and combinations of all of these. Now I've asked the staff to find out if they can tell how the folders are being created in the first place to try and find out which end is responsible.

I know you are not running Windows, and most likely anything I could think of you have already tried... but I had a similar experience a couple of months ago with a web search-bot called General Crawler. It installed copies of its executable files 'way deep down inside my directory tree, and then put a "trigger" in my system registry so that even though I had run the "Uninstall" routine, the trigger would re-install it upon reboot.

Your Macintosh OS hasn't anything like the Windows registry, but could something of the same general idea be gong on with your system?

tanstaafl.

Nothing like that Doug - at least with respect to any third-party app. It may very well be my mail app, but it only keeps settings and other pieces of data in one place that I know of. And I've gone through with a fine-toothed comb to remove any references to these folders that keep getting recreated.

And I don't even know for sure it's the mail client. I do know at this point it's not either of the mail clients for iOS, since I deleted Sparrow and deleted all my mail settings from the default client. The iPhone no longer knows about any email servers at all, let alone accounts or folders.

I can really only think of one next step and that's the nuclear option. Back up all my mail by export (not copying the folders from disk), and then nuke everything to do with Mail on the Mac. Then import what I exported and set up the accounts manually. Ugh.

Apart from the pain in the ass it is to do this, I still don't know if it will work, because the issue may very well be on the server. Though the support staff has not been able to tell me that and all they've done is repeatedly deleted the folders on their end.

So I went partial-nuke and deleted only one account instead of blowing away all accounts and all local mail/folders. After deleting that account I made sure to delete the re-appearing folder from the server, waited 30 minutes and then recreated that account on the Mac, pointing it to the correct IMAP folder. It's now synchronizing all the folders and their contents.

This should indicate a difference between this account and the other (affected) one that I haven't yet deleted/re-created.

Today the folder came back. To me, this implies the issue is at Dreamhost...


This is what I'm gong to do next...

First wait for Dreamhost to reply and evaluate what they say. For this reason I'm not again going to delete the offending folders, just going to leave them in place until they get a chance to look at this all again.

Once that's done either they or I will delete the problem folders.

Then I'll install Thunderbird and set it up with the same accounts (except the IMAP) and import all my local mailboxes/messages.

I'll empty all accounts from the Mac mail client and delete all its preferences from disk. I won't so much as open the program while using Thunderbird.

Now I'll add the IMAP accounts to Thunderbird, making sure first that indeed the problem folders are not showing up when I connect to the meal server from web-mail.

While using Thunderbird I'll keep an eye on the IMAP accounts to see if these folders come back.

If they do, then I can start all this all over again with Dreamhost...

The most shocking thing is that you are still using DM for anything important

Honestly, they've been largely problem free for me for a long while now. I was very close to going elsewhere and after some due diligence found even more people complaining about the other services, especially with regards to email, the main issue I was having at the time with DH.

Moving to a different server is also a large project as I have quite a few sites set up under my control panel and a lot of scripts I'd have to verify/debug. It may happen eventually, but right now the situation is stable and working well.

Ok, DH tried some other stuff but the folders are back after 2 days. Argh.

Took a closer look a Thunderbird and I'm strongly considering skipping it and trying something else. Even just trying to use it temporarily, it's bloody horrible! It doesn't import or export you mail in standard mbox format for starters. It says it imports directly from Apple Mail, but that simply doesn't work, at least not with the Lion version of Mail.

I also just tried "Postbox" which I've since discovered is based on Thunderbird (it's obvious). While it can successfully import all of Mail's folders, the application is again, nothing short of horrible. Seriously, how can someone, an entire team even , release something so poorly thought out? If this was all the was available for accessing mail, I'd use webmail exclusively. Even a 10-year old Yahoo mail UI is better. Frustrating to the point of wanting to throw the computer down a flight of stairs.

Next up is Outlook 2011... Didn't properly import everything. Write-off. Not worth the trouble.

I've decided to simply back up everything from Mail, delete all the original stuff, including prefs, and simply use web mail for the next few days. Somewhat painful, but less so than using one of these other email apps, which are all, to give them more credit than they deserve, huge pieces of shit.

Every developer responsible for Thunderbird should go out right now and apply for a firearms license. In 7 days they should all kill themselves.

I think I have an extra clue as to why so many people like GMail now. Because compared to the state of other (local) email clients, it's actually usable. I hadn't realized how far sensible design practices had devolved for these other applications.

I think I've finally fixed this myself. I was about to jump through some pretty serious hoops, then thought about a "move and nuke" approach. When getting ready for this I looked carefully at the email account creation prefs in the DreamHost panel and noticed an auto-archiving setting.

Immediately I switched over to the accounts I've been seeing the mystery folders on and sure enough, they had this enabled with folders named "Older" - Arrrrgh! I thought that I'd created those "Older" folders originally on the client side so it never occurred to me that there was a process on the server that I could control for this.

I've just set them up in the server-side prefs to use the folders "Archive" which should now solve the issue.