MacOS – prevent OS X 10.8 Mail.app smart mailbox configuration changes/corruption

macosmail.app

I have an IMAP account with number of archive mailboxes structured like

 + Archive  
 +-- 1996
 +-- 1997
 +-- ...
 +-- 2011

I have configured a smart mailbox including all of these mailboxes plus INBOX and Sent Mail from the same IMAP account:

  Contains that match ANY of the following conditions:  
    Message is in mailbox Account (in fact, Inbox/Account)
    Message is in mailbox Account (in fact, Archive/Account)
    Message is in Mailbox 1996 (in fact, Archive/Account/1996)
    ...

It worked just fine since 10.6 I believe. However, starting 10.8 upgrade, Mail.app sometimes loses this configuration, so this smart mailbox starts looking like

  Contains that match ANY of the following conditions:  
    Message is in mailbox Inbox (yes, aggregated inbox of all the accounts)
    Message is in mailbox Archive (yes, aggregated archive of all the accounts)
    Message is in Mailbox No mailbox selected
    ...

I guess this might be related to mail.app Smart mailbox synchronization over iCloud, since I have desktop iMac and Air, and I'm using both. However, I failed to make a synchronized configuration which would be the same on box mail.app instances.

Could you please advise how should I configure this smart mailbox to avoid irritating bug?

Best Answer

The problem indeed was with synchronisation: my iMac had this account configured as name@company.com, while MBA had this account configure as name.alias@company.com. Once I have deleted all IMAP accounts from both iMac and MBA and created it once again, problem disappeared.