IMAP and Duplicate messages in Sent

Question

I have set up Mail to work with AOL mail using IMAP. I would like to have me Sent emails synced, just like the rest of my folders. Unfortunately when I do that and I send an email from Mail it always gets included twice in the Sent folder. What do I do to fix this?
It seems that the program is saving a copy on the Sent folder and AOL is itelf including a copy. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Yes, you guessed it correctly and there is nothing you can do about it. The underlying problem is that AOL doesn’t let IMAP mail clients such as Mail to create or manage mailboxes at the root level of the account directory on the server, only as subfolders of Saved, which means you should turn OFF Store messages on the server for all the mailboxes in Mail > Preferences > Accounts > Mailbox Behaviors, so that Mail stores those mailboxes locally on your computer instead.
But AOL also automatically saves the messages you send through its outgoing server in a server-stored Sent Items mailbox that Mail has no control over no matter what your settings. Hence, having your sent messages saved both in a locally stored Sent mailbox (by Mail) and in a server-stored Sent Items mailbox (by AOL) is normal. You should just ignore the Sent Items mailbox managed by AOL, amongst other reasons because AOL will eventually purge your messages from there after some time without you being able to do anything about that either.