On 9 Jun 2016, at 20:24, Robert Brenstein wrote:
Hi guys,
I am still using Eudora but I am looking at MailMate as its successor.
I used Mac Eudora for ~16 years as my primary MUA. I tried to make the
Eudora-faced Thunderbird work as well for my multi-account,
multi-identity, list-heavy, email flow and it was a massive
disappointment and time-sink. I tried every Mac mail client I could find
over the space of about 4 years, looking for anything that I could live
with instead of fight with and eventually something my very picky boss,
a longtime Claris Emailer user with a similar complex and heavy mail
stream, could tolerate. I'm a senior (i.e. old, tired, and cynical)
sysadmin and have managed mail servers and supported and used a wide
ranges of MUAs for over 20 years, so I'm biased towards flexibility,
formal correctness, and security. My boss is much the same, with a few
years on me...
MailMate is the only MUA that I have liked since giving up on Eudora
6.2.4. It's the only MUA my boss would move to himself and bless as a
company standard. Based on our experiences and on those of most of my
colleagues who have moved to MM, I expect that anyone with "old school"
email proclivities and a lot of email will find it the only serious
option on MacOS X. I also find it telling that I see names popping up on
this list of people who I've looked up to professionally for many years
as technical experts and people who have helped preserve email as the
Internet's "killer app" under the toxic pressures of spam and other
abuse. People who know and love email use MailMate.
HOWEVER: The fact that you're still using "real" Mac Eudora (i.e. 6.2.4,
not "Eudora OSE") and the window style in your screenshot implies an
impediment in moving to MailMate: OS version. MM is distributed as a
x86_64 binary and requires MacOS X 10.7 (Lion). Eudora 6.2.4, the last
version, was a PowerPC-only application and so requires Rosetta to run
on any Intel Mac. Rosetta does not exist for any MacOS version past
10.6, so you are clearly running a system version that cannot run
MailMate. If you cannot upgrade to Lion (e.g. if you have a 1st
generation Core Duo or PowerPC Mac) MM is not an option for you at all.
Also, mailbox conversion can be a real problem, which is a Eudora issue
NOT a MailMate issue. For most of my 4 years wandering in the wilderness
looking for a decent MUA, I still occasionally launched Eudora 6 to
access ancient mail because the conversion tools for the classic Eudora
mailbox format all were a bit broken. It was not until I found a program
called "Emailchemy" (and got a couple of minor bugs in it fixed) that I
was able to convert my whole Eudora archive cleanly into a form that
actually worked with any modern MUA. I chose to have Emailchemy convert
to a form that it made accessible via a trivial read-only IMAP server,
but it can go to other conversion formats that MM can import.
I suspect that there are a number of ex-Eudora users here. The basic
features and operation of MailMate seem fine.
In Eudora, I am using POP3 exclusively but switching to IMAP only
should not be an issue per se. I do not need to access my mail on any
other device than my computer, so IMAP offers no true benefit for me.
POP is configured to leave messages on the server for 2 weeks in case
I need to access them through webmail. I am more concerned about the
workflow and functionality.
I resisted IMAP for a long time because Eudora made it feasible to have
multiple devices using the same account with only one of them (my main
personal Mac running Eudora) ever deleted anything. The workflow
definitely changes with IMAP, even with a single client, because your
definitive mailstore is the server. That forces a change of mindset and
for many people, a deep trust in a mail provider. In my case, I run most
of the IMAP servers I use and own the most important one (and can put my
hands on it 24x7) so the trust issue is reduced. If you have shoddy or
shady mail providers, IMAP (and so MailMate) is problematic.
I have 18 personalities, that is 18 different mail addresses and
almost as many service providers.
That should not be an issue for MM. My current primary system has MM set
up with 8 IMAP accounts on 8 different servers plus 2 fakes that are
permanently offline, one of those being the giant Emailchemy import from
my old Eudora. A fake always-offline "source" is effectively frozen in
MM: all the message data is there but you can't do anything useful with
it.
I have an unknown number of unique addresses because of how I configure
my personal mailserver, such that various patterns are acceptable to it
which route to a single local address which is sorted by a chaotic mix
of procmail on the server and MUA-side rules. As someone using a single
Mac with MailMate, there's no reason you couldn't convert all of your
Eudora rules into MM rules that actually move messages into various IMAP
mailboxes OR into "smart" virtual mailboxes in MM.
I am receiving on average 8500 messages a month. Snapshot of my Eudora
stats is here to see:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13693400/Screenshot-Eudora-Stats.png
Throw some of that away. You can't need a million messages. :)
Unlike some of the others responding here, I prefer mixing the use of
real IMAP folders with "Smart Mailboxes" because directories with very
large numbers of messages are inherently slow on MacOS and very large
mailboxes can be on some mail servers as well. This problem isn't as
pronounced as it used to be, but it's still real. Because MM uses a
mailbox=directory, message=file storage model for its local cache of
messages mirroring the mailbox hierarchy of the server, is very useful
for performance to have rules that move new messages into other IMAP
mailboxes as they arrive and to have habits for datewise archiving
and/or deletion of mail.
That said, my main system's MailMate has ~500k messages in its database.
This was a problem when I only had 8GB of RAM and MM was less careful
about memory. It is no problem with 32GB. My 8GB secondary machine only
has ~250k messages (missing my 1993-2006 archives) and while that makes
MailMate a major memory user on the system, it isn't crashy or
particularly slow, particularly in recent versions. I would not want to
try a million messages on the 8GB Mac.
Most of the traffic, probably like 70% of it, are mailing lists, over
200 of them. I do not, of course, read all those messages but only
selected threads. All incoming messages are sorted out by filters into
close to 300 mailboxes. What is left in the inbox is some junk that
sneaked thru spam filters and a few misc messages.
This is the One True Correct Way for handling a big mailstream. All
other email workflows are less efficient as well as intellectually and
morally suspect. :)
(only 60% kidding...)
I rely on Eudora opening windows for mailboxes with messages that
freshly arrived -- with almost all mailboxes containing unread
messages, the unread mail counters like in Apple Mail are useless for
me.
The well-conceived multi-window behavior of old Eudora is one of the few
things I miss in MailMate. You can approach something similar with a mix
of real and smart mailboxes, for example I have a "recent public list
mail" smart folder which has all of the past 2 weeks of all public lists
I subscribe to, drawn from the real IMAP mailboxes I sort each list
into. It has automatic subfolders for each list with recent traffic.
MailMate does not currently handle the IMAP "\Recent" flag correctly, so
if you set it up to check mail on a slow POP-like schedule, you have no
automatic way to see "what was newly-arrived in my last check." You
could mimic that with the right combination of rules attached to IMAP
mailboxes and smart mailboxes, *I THINK*. I have opened a bug on the
\Recent flaw so maybe Benny will fix it soon.
It seems that MailMate does not support local mailboxes, that is
having mail copied off the server to my computer. MailMate
advertisement states that it offers "Full Offline Access." However,
the following description mentions only administrative functions.
Keeping many thousands of mails on the servers must affect
performance.
As others have noted, MM actually keeps a full copy of all messages in
its local cache, mirroring the mailboxes to which you are subscribed on
the server. This can cause performance issues (as noted above) because
MacOS is not good with directories that have many items in them, but it
isn't bad if you avoid really individual single IMAP mailboxes.
On the other hand, having full offline access to emails (not just
subjects but all content and attachments) and all email-related
functions is essential. Besides working totally offline, I also often
work at locations with slow Internet access.
Because MM keeps a full replica of all messages in the server-side
mailboxes to which you you are subscribed (typically all of them) and
IMAP messages are immutable except for existence and metadata (i.e.
whether a message exists in a mailbox and what its status flags are) you
can do anything you want to messages while an account is offline and the
only difference between that and being online is that changes like
deleting a message or marking it as read or moving it to a different
mailbox won't be made until your next synch with the server.
Another feature that is essential for me is that new mail is checked
only every 30 mins, which is, of course, because of the volume of mail
I get.
Each account has its own default synch periodicity (5/10/30/60 minutes
or manually only) and each IMAP mailbox can have its own special synch
schedule, including "Connected" mode, an IMAP feature where the client
sends an "IDLE" command within a mailbox and waits for the server to
tell it when there's any change.
So, will MailMate be a good mail client for me?
It could be, if you have a system up to handling it and are willing to
rework your whole Eudora setup into a rough equivalent in MailMate. For
the first issue, MailMate with a million messages is likely to want at
least a couple GB of live memory (not "compressed" or swapped to disk)
all to itself. A rough rule of thumb is that MM's indexing database uses
about 1/3 as much disk space as the messages it has indexed and MM will
need 1/2-3/4 of the indexing database in either live or compressed
memory, with performance getting worse as more of that is compressed.
The conversion issue is a harder one to evaluate, since it depends to
some degree on how picky you are about message conversion and how
orderly your Eudora rules are. There are "good enough" message
conversion paths for non-obsessives that are free and there's Emailchemy
(not free) if you demand perfection in all details. There are no tools
for rule translation and the logical structure of how MM applies rules
is entirely different from Eudora.
With those warnings, I can imagine many reasons to NEED to move on from
Eudora and I can't name any other MacOS MUA that comes anywhere close to
being a fit replacement for Eudora with your sort of use. Switching
won't be easy and painless, but it would be better than trying to switch
to any other MacOS MUA.
_______________________________________________
mailmate mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
