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Since I sometimes had very poor Internet connections over the last few month I thought about how I could lower the data transfer volume on my Mac. One of the things that already bothered me since ages is that Exchange accounts in Apple Mail always sync the Public Folders. I never want to read those items and they are really useless.

After a bit of searching around I found two solutions that worked for me. One is only applicable if you are a Domain Administrator on the Exchange server, the other one is not so elegant but also works if you just have a mail account.

As Domain Administrator

  1. Log into the Exchange server and open the “Active Directory Users and Computers” management console.
  2. Find your acoount, click on “Properties” and select the “Exchange Features” tab
  3. Select “IMAP4” and click on “Properties”
  4. Disable “Use protocol defaults” and uncheck “Include all public folders when a folder list is requested”

Now give the Exchange some time to get the changes. After a while the Public Folders shouldn’t be displayed any more and when syncing this IMAP account they are left out as well.

On your local account

  1. Quit Mail
  2. Go to ~/Library/Mail/ (that’s the Library folder in your home directory) and find the folder that holds all the folders & messages for the Exchange account.
  3. Delete all the contents of “Public Folders” (always back-up first, before you delete 😉 )
  4. Select “Public Folders” and press CMD+I to get the Info. (or CTRL+click on it and select “Get Info”)
  5. Now under “Ownership & Permissions” set the folder to “No Access”
  6. Start Mail and observe the beauty of an Exchange IMAP account that doesn’t do useless Public Folders syncing!

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Inspired by a blog post from Adrian Sutton and the comments beneath it I am now documenting how I train Spamassassin from within Apple Mail.
The setup is fairly straight forward but implies that you at least have a working Spamassassin instance running somewhere and know your way around UNIX a little bit. So I’m just going to explain the rough details to get you going.

  1. Switch on the bayes database for SA. On my Debian box this is done via putting the line use_bayes 1 in the file /etc/spamassassin/local.cf. After that restart SA (eg. /etc/init.d/spamassassin restart)
  2. Let SA put all your Junk Messages in the folder “Junk” in your IMAP Account
  3. Let Apple Mail put all your Junk Messages in the folger “Junk” in your IMAP Account
  4. Install a little Cronjob to have SA learn Spam from your Junk folder and Ham (=not Spam) from your Inbox. The following is my script:
    echo "----learn spam----"
    sa-learn --spam /var/opt/vmail/no-panic.at/flo/Maildir/.Junk/*
    echo "----learn ham----"
    sa-learn --ham /var/opt/vmail/no-panic.at/flo/Maildir/*
    Note: those are just 4 lines, the blog just wrapps the two ‘sa-learn’ lines because of limited horizontal space. Of course you have to change the path to the real location of your ‘Junk’ folder.
  5. Last thing to do is installing the cronjob. Mine looks like this:
    0 */4 * * * /path_to_your/script > /dev/null 2>&1

Actually my setup involves learning from 4 different user accounts, who all use Apple Mail just to get more Ham- & Spam-volume faster.
I hope this is helpfull to you. It works perfectly on my server for over a month now.

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Inquisitor got a new release and the best thing it’s now free as the developer announced.
I’m using the first version of inquisitor since about a year ago and I must say I love it. I can’t try out the new version now since I’m currently at a Ubuntu box but I’m gonna download it and install it as soon as I come home.

See what the developer has to say about this 3.0 Beta 1 (v32) Version:

Inquisitor… it’s like Spotlight for the web.

Start typing and websites pop up immediately, along with ideas to refine your search.

It’ll autocomplete your words (is it reading your mind?) and you can add more search engines to Safari with customized keyboard shortcuts.

Oh, and it’s free.

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Adium participated in this year’s Google Summer of Code and took 6 students for a full time internship. The projects they worked on where quite successful as it sounds.

Of course the thing I’m mostly looking forward to is the Audio/Video integration. It wasn’t completely finished in this SoC but it seems like they now have a pretty solid base to build upon.

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