How can I rearrange IMAP folders with multiple accounts in Mail?

Question

Hi all,
I switched to the Mac in 2004, but I've never really used Mail (been using Entourage). I set up an IMAP account in Mail, and was very impressed. So I decided to set up my other IMAP account, too. Now things are a bit messed up. I have these folders
Inbox
Drafts
Sent
Junk
Trash
Email1
Email2
Under Email1 and Email2 are all the IMAP folders for the respective email address, except Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Junk and Trash are separate, and each of those folders has a folder in it called Email1 and one called Email2. How can I change this so that I just ahve the Email1 and Email2 folders, and everything appears under those?
On a less important note, is there any way to make Mail ignore IMAP folders? My email server creates a folder called '.mailboxes' for each IMAP account, and just stores some of its information in there, nothing I want in Mail. So is there a way I can hide this .mailboxes folder?
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Hi mr max pie whatever.
This is actually one of Mail’s best features and cannot be changed.
Instead of grouping mailboxes by account, Mail groups them by purpose first (and uses the account name to differentiate the individual mailboxes associated with each account), then groups by account the remaining mailboxes that don’t belong to any of the standard groups.
This has the advantage of letting you choose at any time, and independently for each mailbox type, whether you want to look at your Inbox, Sent, Trash, etc. mailboxes as if you had just one of them shared by all accounts (i.e. an aggregate), or look at each of the corresponding individual mailboxes separately.
As to the “.mailboxes” folder that you’d rather not see there, I believe Mail shouldn’t show it if the name begins with a period. Moreover, I’ve troubleshooted a few cases where the problem was the opposite, i.e. the user had renamed a mailbox with a leading period and it became inaccessible as a result. I don’t know why Mail behaves so inconsistently in this regard. If all the server-stored mailboxes were subfolders of a parent folder, you could solve the problem by typing the name of the parent folder in Preferences > Accounts > Advanced > IMAP Path Prefix...