another long and boring story about how i solved a problem that no one else that reads this blog will ever have

i started using Opera's M2 email client (built-in to the browser) several months ago when the public beta of 9.5 came out. i hooked up my UT email and dumped Thunderbird and was fairly pleased with the way it all worked. until i was notified that my UT account would be nuked some time after graduation, unless i paid for an alumni service to maintain the account forever. the other option was to forward the address to another account to manage.

i've been putting my UT address on official stuff ever since i got it, so it displeased me to have to give it up. nowadays, people have an easier time changing their address of residence than their email address and cellphone numbers (see my hotmail address, in use since grade 7 -- i just can't get rid of it). because of my severe reluctance to start using another address, or forwarding the mail to a personal account, i sought alternative options. lo and behold, those who seek shall find.

UT has started a beta project in partnership with Google, in which the Gmail service handles an alumni branch of UT email (@alumni.utoronto.ca). the project sought beta testers to try out the system, essentially for free. all i had to do was email the email manager for UT. sweet.

so i forwarded the UT account to the new Gmail-handled alumni account that i was given and set up a new IMAP account in M2 to take care of it. Gmail had recently implemented IMAP and i wanted to take advantage of it.

testing the forwarding system and the IMAP settings with emails to myself, i quickly discovered something strange. in the default view in M2, it shows all messages marked as 'unread'; my test messages were appearing twice. was i downloading two copies of the message? was the forwarding system not working properly? i tested the forwarding system by emailing directly to the alumni account. same problem. time to Google.

my research found a small handful of people encountering the same problem; someone had the answer: the Unread view in M2 is a virtual folder. it simply scans every IMAP folder i am subscribed to and displays anything that hasn't been read yet. the problem was that the Gmail IMAP account shows labels as folders (Sent Mail, All Mail, Inbox, Trash, etc. are all folders). every message i received is given the Inbox label and the All Mail label. if i had a filter set up to shunt certain messages into other folders (Work, Fun, etc), they would show up in the Unread view as well. so, the simple solution would be to simply unsubscribe from one of the IMAP folders -- All Mail being the most reasonable.

in M2, it's fairly easy to customize which IMAP folders to subscribe to. the checkbox interface is intuitive and simple to use. so i used it on the Gmail account and unchecked the All Mail folder. i tried another test message and the double showed up again. i rechecked the IMAP folders. for some reason, the All Mail folder was subscribed to once again. i tried this with every other folder and all folders. they just kept coming back. jerks!

so for a couple of months, i just lived with receiving two copies of mail. that account doesn't receive that much, so it was not a big deal. i was prepared to live with it forever. until i was struck today (12 minutes ago) by inspiration: why don't i just set up a filter that allows my mail to bypass the Inbox? in two minutes, i set up the filters (for both direct and forwarded messages), tested them out and they work like a charm.

naturally, i'm very pleased with myself at this point, though i'm not sure why i never considered this solution earlier. anyway, the morale of this story is to never settle for almost-great. if you're that close to great already, might as well take it all the way.