How to prevent Mail.app from downloading all e-mails from an IMAP Folder (such as Public Folders).

I’m using Mail.app (v. 3.2) and IMAP to connect to an Exchange Server for my e-mails. Unfortunately, I can’t get Mail.app to unsubscribe from thousands of e-mails filling the “Public Folder”. Some users are reporting that it works by right clicking on the account, then “Get Account Info” where you can subscribe/unsubscribe from the “Subscription List”. Not for me, I can’t see a list or something. Hopefully, Apple is going to fix that in a future release (or Microsoft is going to work with standards – hell freezes over). I found a quick & dirty way to prevent Mail.app from downloading an IMAP folder:

  1. Navigate to your home folder. Then from there go to Library/Mail/IMAP-your-account.
  2. Optionally: Go to your disliked folder and delete all the stuff inside.
  3. And here is the trick: Choose the disliked folder, then File -> “Get Info” and make it Locked.

As I said, not a clean fix but simply works!

How to automatically open .torrent and other files in Safari.

This an upgrade of the previous post, now much simpler and works with Snow Leopard too.

  1. First, you have to modify what Safari considers as a “safe” file. Check the option Open “safe” files after downloading in Safari’s Preferences panel.
  2. Download this plist and put it in the folder <your-username>/Library/Preferences.
  3. Finally restart Safari, that’s it!

If you want to digg deeper down: follow this guide.

  1. Create the file com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist (if it doesn’t already exist) in the folder <your-username>/Library/Preferences.
  2. Then copy & paste the xml code stated below in the file. In this example for a .torrent file.
  3. Save it, restart Safari … and voilà!

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com-PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=”1.0″>
<dict>
<key>LSRiskCategorySafe</key>
<dict>
<key>LSRiskCategoryExtensions</key>
<array>
<string>torrent</string>
</array>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Added on december 26th 2009. Thanks to Pan Maselko for this notice.

The most important part of the XML above is the <string>torrent</string> part. This describes the extension (.torrent) which is considered as safe for safari. So that, you can do this for almost any type of file, for example for .psd files. And of course you can have more than one extension to be safe at the same time. This can be done like this:

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com-PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=”1.0″>
<dict>
<key>LSRiskCategorySafe</key>
<dict>
<key>LSRiskCategoryExtensions</key>
<array>
<string>torrent</string>
<string>psd</string>
<string>xyz</string>
</array>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

There are, however, some restrictions which are apparently designed by Apple: the extensions .rar .7z do not work for example.