Dear Bat-fellows, Can you tweak the IMAP mode in The Bat so that it behaves like the iPad's "Mail" client, downloading only the most recent 1000 messages, rather than all the hundreds of thousands (!) of messages from previous years, in dozens of folders?
I've been a TB afficionado since the 1990s and Version 1, and I can't seriously consider any other software for conclusively dealing with my daily load of hundreds of emails. In recent years, though, I've started using the iPhone & iPad to deal with less lengthy emails (one-liners and such) in the course of the day, using TB! typically only once a day at the end of the working hours, dealing with any detailed messages that need to be written and that it would be too awkward to type on the iPad or iPhone. I've stuck to the POP3 mode in The Bat! throughout all these years, although I use IMAP on the iPad and iPhone, of course. Recently, however, I have purchased a MacBook Air, and since I also need to use Windows software on it, I have installed Windows 7 via Parallels Desktop to MBA, and The Bat! 5.2 on top of that. It all works very smoothly, without a hitch: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10440809/misc/The_Bat_on_MacBook.png (The Mac OS Dock auto-hides and I only called it up for the screenshot to illustrate the seamless integration of TB! into the Mac environment.) To be more precise, the smoothness was there when I tried the POP3 version. It started interfering with the original POP3 version of The Bat! on my main PC, though, so I deleted everything on the MacBook and started again from scratch, setting up my accounts as IMAP. The results are as feared: frustrating to use, clumsy, slow, processes hanging in the background all the time, lack of response even when manually attempting to refresh a folder or load a message; you just end up staring at an empty preview pane for a minute or two. It's actually faster for me to open a message via Gmail's webmail in Opera than to wait for it to be finally displayed in the IMAP Bat. No comparison to the ease of use and swiftness, lightning-like, with which The Bat operates in the POP3 mode. The Connection Centre seems useless in the IMAP mode, because it just constantly shows dozens of processes running in the background, but you have no idea what is really going on, and how long you will still need to wait until a particular message is displayed. Extremely frustrating is also that, when using the keyboard shortcuts for moving to the next/previous unread message, I keep landing in Gmail's Spam folders that I otherwise would never have visited. This renders the keyboard shortcuts next to unusable, and the overall experience with the IMAP Bat highly frustrating. I have only set up 4 of my Gmail accounts in The Bat, but it's already too much to handle, whereas my POP3 Bat manages a dozen accounts with ease & lightning-fast. I will appreciate if some of you will let me know how to limit the number of messages to be downloaded by The Bat via IMAP to only the 1000 most recent messages, and how to make The Bat ignore all the IMAP folders except the Inboxes (and perhaps a few others I might specify). It's a sad state of affairs when it's actually preferable to use primitive email software such as "Mail" in iOS, because despite being primitive, it causes less frustration and less loss of time to the user than a full-featured email client of The Bat's caliber in IMAP mode. (And, oh yes, I also tried Mac OS's native "Mail" client -- just as unusable, with similar "hanging issues" to The Bat in IMAP mode, minus all The Bat's great features, so I won't be using "Mail" at all on the MacBook.) -- Yours, Alex. of Slovakia www.avenarius.sk [flying with The Bat! 4.2.44.2 under Windows 7 6.1 Build 7601Service Pack 1] ________________________________________________ Current version is 4.2.42 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
