For quite some time it’s bothered me why changes I make to my mailbox while using IMAP as the access protocol to the server won’t be persisted immediately, but only upon closing the mail client. This is particularly annoying if you’ve organized a bunch of e-mails at home and then check your iPhone (or other client) just to see the old stuff still lying around.

Finally I found the setting which seems to cure this problem, at least if you’re using Thunderbird as your IMAP client. In your preferences dialog under the “General” tab click the button “Config Editor…“. Enter “expunge” In the search field and change the “mail.imap.expunge_after_delete” from “false” to “true“. To be specific this only seems to concern the deletion of e-mails, but it has worked for me when moving e-mails around from folders as well, so I’m happy!

Hope this works for you too, should you need it.

So, I’ve got my mail accounts hosted by an Exchange 2003 server and I’ve connected the borrowed iPhone I’m using to it – works perfectly. Now I’m looking to get the information from there into my Mac somehow. Apart from having my private mail accounts in an Exchange server I’ve also got my professional mail account in an Exchange server and I’m currently using Google Calendar as a merging platform for my calendars (mostly because I don’t want to have to look at two devices in order to determine if I’m available or not).

While trying to solve this I found this article yesterday which has helped me adding my Google Calendar to Thunderbird using two plugins. Since Thunderbird has come to version 3 nowadays I had to download the latest nightly builds of the plugins, they are available here. So now I’ve got my mail working in Thunderbird (although via IMAP) and I’ve also got my calendar with read&write access connected to Google Calendar. Now I just need to figure out how I’ll get the information exchange with my private Exchange account and Google Calendar up and running. For my professional Exchange account I’m using a software called SyncMyCal running within my virtual Windows 7 machine dedicated for work.

Another potential solution might be to have a look at CalDAV for Exchange, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. =)

While preparing my MacBook Pro which I bought for myself on my 30th birtday this Wednesday one of the things to get done was to get the 3G-modem to work. Having used the modem on my various Windows-machines before I knew that a OS X installer was lying around on the internal memory, so I just fired it up. Sadly it turned out that the Launch2Net installer failed, so I proceeded to uninstall it.

After awhile I found a newer version of Launch2Net which allegedly is Snow Leopard compatible (I need to learn that 10.x releases actually differ quite a lot internally from time to time), so I downloaded that one and installed it. Only problem now was that even though the manual claimed that the software would fire up automatically when the modem was inserted nothing happened! No matter how many times I uninstalled the software, rebooted or removed it with AppCleaner and then re-installed it. No go.

By now I started wondering if the rollback of the first installer hadn’t ended cleanly. Long story short, after learning that drivers aren’t what drivers are in Windows but are rather installed as kernel extensions I began looking for where these extensions are stored, the answer is: /System/Library/Extensions. Well, lo and behold – even after having uninstalled all visible traces of the software there were extensions left (named NMSonyEricsson[...]). After having manually deleted these extensions (which actually are folders containing binaries and other stuff) I rebooted and then installed the latest version of Launch2Net SonyEricsson Edition (the link is specifically for the modem I have (SonyEricsson MD400) which in my case happens to be 1.9.1.0 and then rebooted again.

Now it all works! The software fires up when I plug in the modem and it configures itself according to the network the SIM card belongs to and I’m able to connect. I’ve been listening to Spotify for the past 40 minutes now without a hitch – so I’m happy!

What I’m taking away from this is that I continue to not be surprised by the crappy quality a lot of cell network providers have to live with when distributing hardware for which someone else provides the software. Especially when we’re talking about a niche operating system like Mac OS X.

Yesterday was my 30th birthday and it passed without any deadly incidents – phew! What I do want to mention though is that I got a present from my girlfriend which really rocks, I must say!

The best way to explain what I got is to show you this youtube-video:

If all goes well I’ll be a squeeling little boy in that car and I have a feeling that it’s gonna rock my socks off! =)