Account data

[CG1001]

I can not believe it has taken me this long to discover this app. Mac Mail built-in search is absolutely horrendous at best and non usable at worst. This application solves that issue and does so with a well thought out, elegant UI that performs at lighting speed. Anyone that does any sort of email searching needs to utilize this application. Without being overly dramatic this app should be top app in the App Store as it can truly be a life changer for many!

App performs perfectly except for a single situation that pertains to Account data. I am expecting to see in the Account pull down just the 3 email accounts that appear in Mail -> Preferences -> Accounts area however I am seeing 50 or so email addresses, some of them not even mine, some of them mine but with random numbers at the end. I can not seem to figure out where InfoClick is compiling this list from or why it is so cluttered. The best I can tell is that it is pulling out some of the search criteria from some of my smart mailboxes but I could be wrong.

It is easy enough to ignore the extraneous selections in the Account pull down list but the real issue is with the Location column in the search results. The Location column displays Account > Mailbox therefore the same extraneous Accounts appear and since they appear first in the Location data it interferes with sorting that column.

I have around 400,000 emails, dozens of smart mailboxes and around 25 mail folders. Can anyone shed any light as to why this is happening or where this Account data is compiled from? I tried rebuilding the InfoClick database but issue remained.

Thanks

CG

[Bob Stern]

Do you have any "On My Mac" mailboxes? If so, is that where the messages are with strangely displayed account names? (In InfoClick, you can control-click a message and select Open In Apple Mail. The upper right corner of the message in Apple Mail shows its enclosing mailbox.)

[CG1001]

Bob,

Thanks so much for your response. Before my initial post to this forum I did quite a bit of "Reveal File in Finder", "Reveal in Apple Mail", "Open in Apple Mail" to try to determine if the issue was confined to a subset of folders or location but it seems wide spread.

I do have mail stored locally "On My Mac" and most of these extraneous Accounts are indeed coming from those local mailboxes however these extraneous Accounts are also coming from iCloud and Rackspace IMAP accounts as well. I rebuilt the InfoClick database one Account at a time so it was easy for me to determine which extraneous Accounts were being spawned from which actual Accounts.

Many of these extraneous Accounts are simply recipient email addresses which may be coming from the emails themselves or from search criteria within some of my Smart Mailboxes, the only way to tell is to delete all of my Smart Mailboxes which at this point I want to completely avoid.

As I said above: It is easy enough to ignore the extraneous selections in the Account pull down list but the real issue is with the Location column in the search results. The Location column displays Account > Mailbox therefore the same extraneous Accounts appear and since they appear first in the Location data it interferes with sorting that column. A good work around would be if there was simply a Mailbox column in search results that I can do the sorting on.

If I understood from where the Account list is being compiled from I would be better suited to ferret out the cause and possible solution.

Thanks again for responding and sharing your thoughts.

CG

[Bob Stern]

My experience is that messages inside On My Mac mailboxes display as their Account some random IMAP account, which can be quite confusing.

However, I have never seen an erroneous display of the Account for an iCloud account or a non-Apple IMAP account (I have both). You'll have to wait for Martin's advice on that.

Incidentally, if you look in ~/Library/Mail/V8 or V9, at the top level are several folders whose names are random-appearing UUID's. One of the folders has all your OnMyMac mailboxes, and each of the others represents a single IMAP account.

[CG1001]

Bob,

Thanks again for responding. I am intimately familiar with Mac Mail storage structure and the various UUID folders, plist files etc... as a long term Mac user I have done my fair share of rebuilds and deep dive tinkering. In other words I know just enough to get myself in and out of trouble every now and again.

Hopefully Martin can she light on where the Account list get compiled from as I have only 3 actual Mail Accounts but over 50 Accounts listed in InfoClick. As I said in my previous post, If I understood from where the Account list is being compiled from I would be better suited to ferret out the cause and possible solution.

Martin- I love InfoClick save for this one issue!! Can you help shed light on where the Account list gets compiled from?

Thanks

CG

[martin]

First, thank you for your kind words regarding InfoClick! It makes us happy to hear that you enjoy our app

As for the confusing accounts listing in InfoClick, this is unfortunately not entirely unexpected. Apple Mail does not report this information at all. InfoClick has to work to infer and guess at account information. The process is not straightforward.

I agree that InfoClick could do a better job here. Maybe we can take a look at the process again and find some way to improve it. Thanks for your feedback!

[martin]

In communicating privately over email, CG discovered that the situation can be improved by manually editing one of InfoClick's internal files. If you're the type of user that doesn't mind a little fiddling you can change the display name(s) that InfoClick decided to use for your detected accounts. This works pretty well. Here's what you can do:

1. Quit InfoClick if it is running.
2. Locate InfoClick's sandbox folder which has the path:

Code: Select all

~/Library/Containers/com.nisus.InfoClick/

(A reminder that the Finder on recent versions of macOS will hide the real folder name "com.nisus.InfoClick" and instead display "InfoClick")

3. Inside that sandbox folder, open the following file in a text editor:

Code: Select all

Data/Library/Application Support/InfoClick/InfoClick.giadb/AppleMailAccountsInfo.plist

4. Look for the keys "displayName" and edit the associated string values as appropriate.

The only caveat is that this can't solve the issue of account fragmentation, where a single account is stored or spread by Apple Mail across multiple folders. It's impossible to unify these separate data sources under a single InfoClick account name using this technique.