Lion Mail & Exchange: Why are there two inboxes and 1 is not working?

Hi there,

I am new to Mac and OS X. I recently bought my wife a MacBook Air and, of course, I am playing with it a little bit myself.

While I really like the intuitive usage of the OS, I stumbled upon something very strange in the Mail app. I am using a hosted Exchange account and setting it up in the Mail app was much easier than with Windows and Outlook?!?
Everything seems to work fine, but I find it very strange, that some folders are shown twice. One time under 'Mailboxes' on the top of the list on the left hand side, and one time under the name of my account (see attached screenshot). But all the folders under my account are empty and do not sync with the server. The three folders under 'Mailboxes' (Inbox, Sent, Trash) work fine and sync perfectly including the subfolders.

Of course I can hide the folders under my account. But I think it's very strange. I also can't use the menu item 'Use this folder for...' as all the options are greyed out.

So, does someone know why Mail behaves like that?

Thanks a lot!
iBlueDragon

Mail shows any remote-server-based (usually IMAP) accounts separately even though there is some overlap. The reason for this is so that the server-based folders are shown (infected items, I giggled at that).

You can't rename or re-purpose remote email folders because the Mail program doesn't have the server's permission to do that. You would want to access the remote server via a web browser to do any of that.

If you'll click on the little arrow next to the Inbox and Sent under "Mailboxes," I think you'll find you have more than one account, probably that's been set up by accident. You can fix that in the preferences under accounts.

Thanks, chas_m.

I thought so, but why are the server folders empty, while the mailbox folders are not?

If I click on the arrows next to 'Inbox' or 'Trash' under "Mailboxes" I get the list of my subfolders in the inbox (or trash). This all works correctly. But why are the server folders empty - and therefore useless?

Another strange thing is that I actually don't have server folders named 'Inbox' or 'Sent Messages', as my account is set up in German and therefore the folders have the respective German names...

Kind regards,
iBlueDragon

So, I did some more testing and googleing...

There seem to be two issues:

1. Language Issue:
The mailboxes under 'Mailboxes' on the top connect to the correct folders on the server, no matter of their name (English or German). So everything is working fine there.
But the inbox folder listed under my server account was obviously looking for a folder on the server with name inbox. But as the folder has a German name, it did not find it. After I changed the name of that folder on the server, I saw my inbox incl. the subfolders under my server account as well. So it's a strange thing that a folder named 'inbox' showed up in the first place, because before I renamed it on the server such a folder did not exist.

2. General Issue of Mail connecting to Exchange:
I found a thread on the Apple support forums, where many others using Lion have problems with 'loosing' folders when connecting to an Exchange server. While I never saw all my folders that are on the server (like drafts) in the first place, this basically seems to be the same issue.

So for now I am waiting for an update and will probably disable the exchange account for mail (but keep it for calendar and contacts) and re-add it as an IMAP account (a workaround suggested in the support forum).

But actually I am a little bit disappointed - especially as it seems to have worked fine with Mail in Snow Leopard (as far as I have learned from the forums).

CU
iBlueDragon