So put yourself in this position: You purchased an iPhone, an iPod, or a new Mac. The specific product doesn’t really matter, but the important thing is that it doesn’t perform to your expectations. Far from it, in fact. You bought the gadget on the promise that Apple’s gear “just works,” and found that, as far as you’re concerned, the claim is false.

What can you do to gain satisfaction?

The usual first step would be to call customer service, and that’s usually sufficient to resolve your issues. Or you may bring the malfunctioning product to an Apple Store, and consult someone at the Genius Bar. That form of two-way communication is best, and it also gives Apple a chance to observethe situation at first hand, and that can do wonders.

Before I go on, I’m not dismissing the possibility of getting satisfaction from a third-party Apple reseller. Many are fully dedicated to the Mac platform and will definitely provide skilled assistance.

But what if none of that succeeds, and you are still suffering from the same problems that caused this mess in the first place?

Well, now things are apt to get complicated. You could, of course, take the issue up the corporate ladder. I’ve done that in the past, and always found someone in management to handle my problem in a friendly and productive fashion. The most recent episode occurred a few years back, when I had problems with a 23-inch Apple Cinema Display. In the end, a brand new unit was waiting for me at one of the nearest branches of the Apple Store, and I was a happy camper. And no, folks, I made no effort whatever to use my status as a member of the tech media to force a favorable outcome. It wasn’t necessary, nor should it be necessary for most of you. That’s why Apple continues to get extremely high grades for support.

However, there are some who prefer taking a fast trip to their lawyer, in hopes that a lawsuit, or at least the threat of one, will set things right. Believe you me, that can truly open a can of worms, and it is rare that the outcome will even be close to satisfactory.

Now any time you look at one of Apple’s SEC filings, you’ll see a number of legal actions in the hopper. I’m not going to list them, nor attempt to decide whether they have merit or not. That’s part of the cost of doing business. Sometimes Apple will even settle with other companies that claim intellectual property violations. In certain cases, it’s because the lawsuits had merit. In other cases, Apple decides that it’s cheaper to settle than to pursue extended and costly litigation that may take years to resolve.

You’ve no doubt read about the recent actions, which involve complaints that Apple and perhaps AT&T misrepresented the performance potential of the iPhone 3G. Most of these claims focus on the ads from Apple boasting up to twice the broadband speeds compared to the older EDGE network.

Now I’ve said this before. Apple’s claim has the requisite fine print that says, in effect, that you can basically get up to twice the speed with 3G except in cases where you don’t. That may seem flippant, but there are lots of conditions that may prevent you from getting snappy 3G speeds, or even connect to the 3G network. So there you go.

I should think that a lawyer who was paying attention would know that, and realize quickly that a claim of this nature — even if expanded to class-action status — stood a high chance of failing. However, that doesn’t stop the ambulance chasers in our midst. They are simply hoping that Apple might relent and pay them off rather than endure protracted litigation.

If a settlement is made, the plaintiff’s lawyers stand to make a huge payday, netting fees of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, depending on the size of the settlement. But what about the poor, deceived consumer? Just how do they fare?

Well, in just about every case I know about — and there may be others I don’t recall — regular people will, at most, get a discount coupon for a future Apple purchase. Period! No cash will change hands, and the presence of a coupon may spur them on to buy merchandise they might not have otherwise considered.

Assuming that they have to cough up extra cash, Apple, with its traditionally high margins, stands to make a profit even at the reduced price. Even better, unless the coupon has a pretty high value, at least over $50 or so, the chances that it will ever be redeemed aren’t terribly high. The victors in this case may simply put them away, expecting to use them some day. But that day never arrives, and the coupon expires.

A similar situation exists for rebates. Do you really think every eligible person truly files a claim? It never happens, but the promise of a rebate may be sufficient to spur sales anyway, and that’s what it’s all about.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t sue Apple if you think you have a case. But try to use a little common sense first. Were you actually injured in some fashion (finally or otherwise) because of what you perceived was fraud on the part of Apple?

Consider this too: If you don’t like what you bought from Apple, feel free to go elsewhere. That may take a whole lot less time and effort than enduring an extended legal action.

Of course, if that means, as a Mac user, you’d have to switch to Windows, well, maybe that’s what you may have to think about, even though it’s not a pleasant prospect.

Just this week, the estimates came out about how well Apple did in January. According to Piper Jaffray, which has been frequently known to get their figures wrong, Apple is on track to sell between 2 million and 2.2 million Macs for the first three months of 2009, compared to 2.3 million for the same period last year.

Now in this shaky economic climate, I suppose you could say that’s pretty good news. Other PC makers should do as well, and, despite the first drop in Mac sales in quite a while, if that sales rate sustains itself, Apple will probably earn a decent profit. All well and good.

But can you believe Piper Jaffray?

Well, according to the NPD Group, which I regard as having a pretty good degree of credibility, Apple’s retail sells fell 6% in January.

However, it seems that Apple is notorious for exceeding the expectations of analysts in their quarterly statements. “Beat the Street” is a common refrain repeated, even if the stock market doesn’t always approve of the actual numbers.

In any case, you have to wonder just where Piper Jaffray is doing its surveys to come up with its numbers. Do they examine the sales at Apple’s own retail chain? Well, not exactly, since Apple doesn’t just hand out that information. What about NPD? Well, according to analyst Stephen Baker, whose been a guest on The Tech Night Owl LIVE, “This is the first time in a long time that Apple has underperformed the market.”

All right, folks, I’m not the sort of person to require that the news about Apple always be favorable. With sales tanking in nearly every market segment, except, perhaps, for McDonalds and Wal-Mart, I suppose there’s nothing particularly unusual about Apple’s current predicament. Things could even get worse, since there’s no telling whether the current recession has bottomed out yet or has a ways to go.

Certainly when just paying for the necessities, such as housing, utilities and food, may be difficult, it’s not reasonable to expect people would still be as willing to shell out upwards of $1,000 to buy a new Mac. That they are still doing so in reasonable numbers is surely a tribute to Apple’s stellar success in convincing customers that the Windows way is the wrong way, and that they have a better answer to personal computing for regular people.

It’s also not the first time Apple has encountered a sales downturn. More to the point, even if sales at the end of the quarter are still below last year’s levels, it doesn’t mean that profits will turn to losses. Apple, courtesy of their COO Tim Cook, maintains extremely tight controls on inventory. If sales of particular products aren’t going as well as expected, they will simply turn down the spigots so they aren’t saddled with lots of unsold product. That means there’s still a possibility for reasonable profits when the financials are released.

Even if profits are near-nonexistent, don’t believe anyone who says that Apple is poised to return to the dark days of the mid-1990s, where red ink nearly did the company in. They have over $28 billion in the bank (and we hope it’s a bank that’s still solvent), and they could certainly access those funds if necessary to cover a deficit. Indeed, they could survive for quite some time in this fashion without having to go into debt.

Indeed, Apple remains debt free, and in this particular questionable economic climate, that’s a great place to be. More to the point, they have a market cap that’s way higher than all the American auto companies combined. You could certainly call Apple prosperous.

In any case, the next question is whether Apple is just going to wait out the financial downturn or wow us soon with more trend-setting products in an attempt to fuel sales. This takes us to an area that’s way beyond my pay grade. I couldn’t begin to suggest whether a major media event with some cutting-edge gear would be sufficient to improve sales way beyond where they’d be otherwise.

My suspicion, however, is that Apple isn’t going to cut back on new product introductions, despite the situation. Steve Jobs has said, in the past, that the company will always innovate out of recessions, as they did several years back in a lesser economic downturn. There’s little doubt they’re going to do so this time too.

The only issue is, of course, when the next new product announcement will come, and what sort of products will be presented. It could simply come in the form of a basic press release, which might suit for a simple iMac or Mac mini refresh. But with Apple, I’m not about to do any guessing.

But I will continue to explore those sales reports, even if they don’t necessarily reflect the entire picture. You’ll just have to wait till April for the answers.

After looking at the mock-up for Windows Mobile 6.5, I am apt to think that there’s nothing that Microsoft can do that’s innovative in any fashion. The upgraded interface merely comes across as a mixture of the cheesy Windows desktop environment, along with a Home button essentially copied from the Mac OS, sans the chimney.

Now I don’t know about you, but the effort strikes me as downright pathetic, and I have to wonder whether Microsoft’s kool aid drinkers are actually consuming stronger stuff, and not to their benefit.

Besides, aren’t we past the point where people are going to blindly accept warmed over imitations from Microsoft rather than the real things from Apple and other companies?

Maybe not, because whenever Apple comes up with a new product, Microsoft’s shrinking legion of fanboys will tell us just how pathetic the concept is, and that it’s destined to fail. You read that when the original iPod came out, and when the iPhone was released.

In each case, pretenders from other companies got absolute raves. We had iPod killers and iPhone killers, but none were shown to be superior to Apple’s offerings in any way, except for a handful of features that people may or may not need. In the areas where Apple excels, the ultra-elegant user interface, the competition falls down, and certainly Microsoft is one of the worst offenders.

These days Microsoft is having some struggles with which to contend. PC sales are declining and they recently announced plans to shed 5,000 from their bloated staff. That, of course, doesn’t apparently include contractors, of which there may be thousands more. A contractor would be a freelancer hired directly or through a third-party agency, and they wouldn’t be eligible for the advantages of being a real salaried employee, and could be dismissed far more easily.

This doesn’t mean Apple has a clear field, or that you will wake up soon and find that the Mac OS has beaten Windows in terms of market share fair and square. If it happens at all, it would take years to accomplish, and it’s quite possible that Linux and operating systems we don’t even know about yet will splinter the market so much that no single company can attain the sort of dominance Microsoft held for so long.

More to the point, Apple could make some huge mistakes that would slow or halt its incredible progress.

Let’s take a look at 2009, for example. Now the fact that Steve Jobs isn’t working full-time as CEO probably isn’t much of a factor. It does appear as if he’d be called upon to make critical decisions regardless of the state of his health — unless it gets really bad — and the product releases and marketing concepts are probably pretty much etched in stone at this point.

Now I suppose you can forgive Apple for not paying any heed to the 25th anniversary of the Mac. It might have been nice to release something fancy on the day in question, but that’s not something that would represent a serious calamity. However, just what new stuff have we seen from Apple so far?

The unibody version of the 17-inch MacBook Pro is evidently beginning to ship. Other than that fancy new and non-removable battery, it’s simply a grown up version of the Mac Pro released last fall. While iLife ’09 and iWork ’09 are worthy upgrades, they aren’t earth-shattering either.

So far, at least, there is no new iMac or Mac mini on the horizon, although they’ve both been expected for weeks now. The real question is why the delay, particularly since Mac desktop sales suffered during the last quarter. That, in and of itself, would be good reason to want to expedite release of substantial refreshes.

If Apple were simply to incorporate MacBook Pro parts into the iMac and MacBook parts into the Mac mini, it would seem doubtful that the effort would require any large amount of engineering expense. If the changes are going to be of a more significant nature, of course, maybe that would explain the apparent delay, though I hasten to mention that Apple never promised anything at any particular time. They seldom do.

There is a new quad-core mobile processor from Intel that might really soup up the iMac, particularly with Snow Leopard and its enhanced multiprocessor support in the wings. Is that the factor? It wouldn’t explain a delay in the Mac mini, unless Apple is seriously reworking that form factor.

I’m not saying much about the Mac Pro, except that the newest generation of Intel Xeon processors is due at the end of March, and it may be a trivial effort to incorporate them into Apple’s high-end workstation. Maybe potential customers will even have the money to buy the new models in a few months, to take advantage of the expected substantial performance boost.

As to netbooks, I suppose the jury is still out. Right now, they appear to be mostly cannibalizing sales of more expensive PC note-books. If that represents the major portion of their market penetration, it’s Microsoft’s problem, since none of them can run Vista, and some come with Linux. Moreover, the forthcoming Windows Mobile update is surely not suited to a PC, even a low-end one.

As it stands, Microsoft may continue to suffer regardless. But it would be nice to see some compelling new product action from Apple, if only to demonstrate that they haven’t fallen asleep at the wheel.

So a few weeks ago, I moved our online content to a new server, one with dual quad-core processors, 16GB RAM and a lot more bandwidth. One big change I made was to stop funneling messages through a third-party service and move everything in-house, so to speak, so we had full control.

Since all our email is uses the IMAP protocol, I simply had to move the messages from the old accounts to the new ones, after creating new accounts with the updated incoming and outgoing server information. It’s not an instantaneous process, but simple to do.

However, I have accumulated some 40,000 messages over the past decade. I’m not sure why I keep some of the older ones around, but nonetheless it took several hours for the task to complete.

Now some commercial email services can do this IMAP to IMAP transfer in the background, but I opted for the manual method rather than explore an automated alternative. I felt that just doing it was quicker than seeking out other solutions, but feel free to tell me your experiences in our Comments section.

In any case, things seemed to be working fine after the initial process of downloading the messages from our own server had finished. That is except for one thing, and therein lies a tale.

You see, suddenly my Inbox for tw0 of my email accounts began to spawn multiple Inboxes, in what appeared to be subfolders. It didn’t happen in the remaining accounts, for reasons I do not pretend to understand. However, I dutifully deleted the extraneous folders, only to find them returning whenever I relaunched Apple Mail.

So I began to search for solutions, and indeed there were several, but as you will learn shortly, not all proved successful and one was downright boneheaded.

First, it appeared there are two things in common for all or most of these cases. First, is that folks suffering from this anomalous email behavior are using a Leopard version of Mail. Second, the email server is using an open source application known as Courier IMAP.

Now if you have a Linux-based Web host that provides either cPanel or Parallels Plesk to manage your sites, you’ll find that Courier is part of the standard installation. So I rather suspect many of you might be vulnerable to this problem.

So let me tell the steps I followed to arrive at a solution.

In theory, when you delete an IMAP folder in Mail, it will delete the one on your mail server when the next connection is established. That happens every time Mail requests new messages, although you can use the Synchronize All Accounts function, in the Mail’s Mailbox menu, whenever you want to hasten the process.

Unfortunately, the problem wasn’t resolved. Next time Mail launched, the folders had returned, phoenix-like, in all their irritating glory.

My next step in resolving this dilemma was to login to our server, and attempt to manage the task remotely. I won’t detail the process here, as the location of your email fodlers will differ depending on which control panel your host is using, and, in the end, you may not even have access unless you have a VPS or dedicated server contract with them.

In any case, I deleted the extraneous folders on the server, but they returned as soon as Mail was launched from any of my Macs. Not good.

One wrong turn recommended by a certain well-known Mac troubleshooting site, in an article taking advice cribbed from Apple’s support forums, was to change the IMAP path prefix. This is a setting in Mail’s Advanced preference pane, under Accounts, that determines whether the extra folders in your account appear as subfolders in your Inbox or separately. If you have several email accounts in regular use, I suggest the latter.

If a path prefix is required, as it would be with a Courier IMAP setup, the path prefix would be created automatically by Mail when you set up the account. Removing it did nothing but turn my extra folders into subfolders under the Inbox. It didn’t eliminate the problem, and I didn’t expect it to. So I changed the setup back to its normal configuration, which, as I said, uses INBOX.

Now without belaboring the point, another suggestion calls for editing Mail’s preference file, the one in your Users / Library / Preferences folder, via Apple’s Property List Editor, which comes with the Apple Developer’s installation, or a third-party preference editor. It seems that a partly-corrupted preference file is supposed to be a major cause of this problem. But the solution seems a little extreme and, frankly, I felt I’d rather try other remedies first, and that leaves two.

The first is simply to trash the preference file, which removes all your accounts, other than the one for MobileMe, which is part of your default setting (assuming you are a member of MobileMe of course). That’s a fairly quick solution, particularly if you have only one or two accounts to recreate. Remember, too, that you don’t lose any of your messages, because you’re using IMAP. They’re stored on the server, not your Mac. Remember?

My solution was a little less draconian. I just deleted and recreated the actual accounts that were affected by this phenomenon after, of course, removing the errant folders. That proved to be the ideal solution — at least for me. Indeed, launching and relaunching Mail on my desktop and note-book Macs did not create any new problems.

So the case of the extra Inboxes was solved, at least for me. I suppose, in the scheme of things, it’s a minor problem and probably most who encounter it won’t care one way or the other if there’s an extra folder around. But that’s not me.