hey folks,
i have a little more info on this problem...
about my setup:
i have a mail server running dovecot imap on port 143 and uw imap on 8143. all mail is delivered directly to ~/mbox.
what happens:
when mail talks to dovecot, every time you check new mail, it re-downloads the entire mailbox. new mail does not show up in the inbox, even after it can be confirmed delivered (via mutt on the server). the really wierd part: even though the message doesn't show up in the list of messages in the inbox, the number of new messages floating above the dock icon (and next to the combined "In" box) *does* go up! wtf?? if you switch between mailboxes, or select "rebuild mailbox", the new message shows up of course both involve resynching the entire mailbox again... my first thought was that this was some kind of wierd application bug, but i'm not so sure.
with uw-imap, when you select check new mail it does not re-download the entire mailbox, but the new message does not reliably show up until you switch from one message to another in your inbox. so it seems like there's *some* kind of difference between the two servers...
and here come the questions:
what would cause apple mail to always download all messages from dovecot but not from uw-imap?
i found the following link, is it still relevant?
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2004-April/044513.html
is this something that might be resolved with 1.0-stable?
is there something specific i should look for in protocol dumps?
would compacting mailboxes have any effect on this?
anyway, thanks to everyone who's helped so far... sean