Re: [MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?
As far as I am aware the mail component of the $20 Apple OS Server product requires a fixed IP address, plus appropriate DNS entries of course. On 25 Aug 2015, at 19:14, Helen Holzgrafe wrote: We also use Apple Server mail with Mailmate. Because there are two of us we use an older mac as a designated server machine, but you can use Apple server on your own machine to host your own imap mail and use your own disk drive as a direct mail archive. For $20 for Apple Server software and possibly a cheap outboard disk drive (that you probably have already), you can avoid limits pretty much anywhere. We have our own mail domain, but you can use a mix of your own accounts just on your server and real accounts like Google mail and move messages between them. We were using Postbox (and Eudora before that) and .mbox files. Then, my .mbox files got bitrot of some kind and ultimately Postbox could not read many of them. It took much work to translate more than 34 messages archived for 20 years that were somewhat garbled, but I did. On 25 Aug 2015, at 7:58, David O'Donnell wrote: On 25 Aug 2015, at 7:03, Brian Scholl wrote: Also, a more theoretical postscript: It seems to me that Benny's reluctance to pursue any sort of .mbox export […] I can’t speak to the IMAP-*v*-POP3 debate, but I would really love the ability to export a series of messages as a .mbox file in the same format that Apple Mail does. In addition to using SpamSieve on my Mac (which is quite good), I maintain my own mail server (Mac OS X 10.6.8, until I am forced to “upgrade”) and use SpamAssassin there to try to intercept as much crud as possible *before* it gets to SpamSieve. Apple Mail produces the perfect .mbox files for feeding to SpamAssassin’s spam-learning routines, so periodically I have to haul Mail out, select all the junk that SpamAssassin needs to learn how to intercept, and File Save As… (raw source) to a file that I can then drag to the server and run learnspam against. OooH! A tactic I had not realized I can use! Thanks, I will start doing doing this right away! -Helen ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?
A big +1 for a new feature of right-click-on-mailbox - Export This Mailbox with at least .mbox as one of the output formats. I'm fine if that is the only output format, but maildir would be useful as well. --Paul Hoffman ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?
For whatever it's worth, I use http://offlineimap.org to archive email locally but keep it on the server, and then unsubscribe from the folder in MailMate. I also do not care about storage costs, I just want my email in an interchange format. This works for me. It brings down messages in well-formatted maildir, which can then be easily converted to mbox. I think a lot of reasonable email archive type programs also support maildir though. On 25 Aug 2015, at 13:26, Paul Hoffman wrote: A big +1 for a new feature of right-click-on-mailbox - Export This Mailbox with at least .mbox as one of the output formats. I'm fine if that is the only output format, but maildir would be useful as well. --Paul Hoffman ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
[MlMt] (OT) Re: Local email archiving status/options?
On 25 Aug 2015, at 13:14, Helen Holzgrafe wrote: We also use Apple Server mail with Mailmate. Because there are two of us we use an older mac as a designated server machine, but you can use Apple server on your own machine to host your own imap mail and use your own disk drive as a direct mail archive. For $20 for Apple Server software and possibly a cheap outboard disk drive (that you probably have already), you can avoid limits pretty much anywhere. We have our own mail domain, but you can use a mix of your own accounts just on your server and real accounts like Google mail and move messages between them. I have the latest versions of Server available to me (and five fixed IPs from my ISP)—which is one of the reasons why I am sticking with 10.6.8. Apple did away with mailing lists, Webmail, MySQL, and Apple’s quite-functional Server tools to control the server and users, in Server 10.7 and later. Replacing MySQL is trivial, but so far I have not found a usable replacement for Squirrelmail and from what I’ve read Mailman is quite a challenge to get running, too. -- ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?
On 25 Aug 2015, at 7:03, Brian Scholl wrote: Also, a more theoretical postscript: It seems to me that Benny's reluctance to pursue any sort of .mbox export […] I can’t speak to the IMAP-*v*-POP3 debate, but I would really love the ability to export a series of messages as a .mbox file in the same format that Apple Mail does. In addition to using SpamSieve on my Mac (which is quite good), I maintain my own mail server (Mac OS X 10.6.8, until I am forced to “upgrade”) and use SpamAssassin there to try to intercept as much crud as possible *before* it gets to SpamSieve. Apple Mail produces the perfect .mbox files for feeding to SpamAssassin’s spam-learning routines, so periodically I have to haul Mail out, select all the junk that SpamAssassin needs to learn how to intercept, and File Save As… (raw source) to a file that I can then drag to the server and run learnspam against. -- ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?
We also use Apple Server mail with Mailmate. Because there are two of us we use an older mac as a designated server machine, but you can use Apple server on your own machine to host your own imap mail and use your own disk drive as a direct mail archive. For $20 for Apple Server software and possibly a cheap outboard disk drive (that you probably have already), you can avoid limits pretty much anywhere. We have our own mail domain, but you can use a mix of your own accounts just on your server and real accounts like Google mail and move messages between them. We were using Postbox (and Eudora before that) and .mbox files. Then, my .mbox files got bitrot of some kind and ultimately Postbox could not read many of them. It took much work to translate more than 34 messages archived for 20 years that were somewhat garbled, but I did. On 25 Aug 2015, at 7:58, David O'Donnell wrote: On 25 Aug 2015, at 7:03, Brian Scholl wrote: Also, a more theoretical postscript: It seems to me that Benny's reluctance to pursue any sort of .mbox export […] I can’t speak to the IMAP-*v*-POP3 debate, but I would really love the ability to export a series of messages as a .mbox file in the same format that Apple Mail does. In addition to using SpamSieve on my Mac (which is quite good), I maintain my own mail server (Mac OS X 10.6.8, until I am forced to “upgrade”) and use SpamAssassin there to try to intercept as much crud as possible *before* it gets to SpamSieve. Apple Mail produces the perfect .mbox files for feeding to SpamAssassin’s spam-learning routines, so periodically I have to haul Mail out, select all the junk that SpamAssassin needs to learn how to intercept, and File Save As… (raw source) to a file that I can then drag to the server and run learnspam against. OooH! A tactic I had not realized I can use! Thanks, I will start doing doing this right away! -Helen ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
[MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?
Please pardon the length of this plea for help, and please pardon my naivete. (I am switching not only from another client to MailMate, but from POP to IMAP at the same time -- with all the changes in workflow and mindset that entails -- and I am probably under the grip of some false assumptions.) I have already convinced myself that I must switch to MM for all sorts of reasons (most of them involving customizability), so that is now a foregone conclusion. (I will also say that the degree of transparency available about the status of MM's development -- in Benny's many quick replies in this list, plus the issue tracker -- seems like a *huge* plus.) I am facing a single roadblock, though, that is the lack of support for any local message archiving. Having read the list archives extensively, I have the following two impressions: 1. A good number of people need/want this, in some form or another. (It keeps coming up on the list semi-regularly, and by my count it has occasioned at least 6 different tickets over years, etc.) For some people, this is a need driven by server/account size constraints. For others, it is simply a workflow-related preference. And this has led at least some users to cook up fairly obscure, complicated, and/or kluge-y solutions (such as Fredrik Jonsson's method of setting up and running a local IMAP server to implement local archiving). 2. But the probability of Benny adding this option anytime in the foreseeable future seems to be somewhere between very low and zero. (He has generally flagged these sorts of tickets as 'bluesky'.) I have the impression that this is not because it's especially technically challenging, but because he's philosophically opposed to it. (Most of his replies in the relevant list threads involve trying to get people to stop wanting this in the first place, and/or to ask for IMAP quota increases instead, etc.) I don't resent this perspective at all, but I nevertheless need some workaround since this is nonnegotiable for me -- and the purpose of this message is to try to clarify my options. What I want, in brief, is this: I want to use MM to sort my incoming mail into various IMAP folders (probably about 20 of them, and probably using some combination of filters/rules and manual message-moving via custom keybindings). Then I'll interact with my mail on a daily basis via those folders along with many additional MM Smart folders. Then, every so often (e.g. once per year) -- when some of those IMAP folders get huge and/or old, I want to archive them to some form of local-only folder/storage, such that (1) I can then mass-delete all of the messages from those IMAP folders (so that there are no longer any copies stored online), at which point those particular folders will just start filling up again from scratch with new incoming mail; but (2) I can still occasionally browse the local-only archived messages somehow (even if this is done in some other program such as DevonThink or EagleFiler -- though obviously it would be nice to be able to do this in MM itself). I should also stress that my desire to work this way with local-only archives isn't driven by any external constraints. (For example, my IMAP account quota limits are infinite, for all practical purposes.) Rather, it is simply how I want to work -- and this isn't going to change. So my plea to the list members is just this: what are my best options for doing this? 1. LOCAL EXPORT? Can I somehow export an IMAP folder from MM to any form of locally-accessible file/archive (such as an .mbox file)? It appears that this isn't possible, and this is what Benny isn't too keen on adding. (But I'm not sure about this either. In an older -- March 2011 -- reply to a ticket along these lines, Benny wrote: An export function (probably to the .mbox format) is also planned since it is frequently requested by users. -- but I take it that this never materialized.) And while he also noted in that same ticket thread that you can drag messages out of MailMate to get standard .eml files which should be importable by most other email applications -- but it sounds that like that's not really feasible for exporting/archiving a mailbox with thousands of messages. 2. SNEAKY OFFLINE ACCESS TO MM'S LOCAL IMAP FILES? MailMate stores its own local copies of your IMAP email so that you can work offline. Okay. So is there any sneaky way to use these very files as local-only archives? (Here I'm pretty ignorant; e.g., I don't know if different IMAP mailboxes [and the messages they contain] are locally stored by MM as separate folders/files or not. But clearly MM is storing them locally in *some* format.) For example, if there were some way to move those files around, then would it be possible even in principle to (1) copy one of those files/folders to some other part of my Mac's file system; then (2) manually delete the contents of the relevant IMAP folder; but (3) later be able to manually move the copied
Re: [MlMt] edit unsent message in outbound always creates copy
On 25 Aug 2015, at 11:58, Benny Kjær Nielsen mailingl...@freron.com wrote: On 25 Aug 2015, at 11:15, Max Rydahl Andersen wrote: I asked this before but it keeps failing ;/ Any message in outbound only provide Edit as new message that creates a copy instead of just letting me edit the outbound message. What am I doing wrong ? Nothing. I'm assuming this is when you have the machine offline and MailMate cannot send the messages yet? Yes. (At least, for the “Send Later” messages I have “Cancel Send and Edit” in the menu.) I have the cancel send and edit sometimes. But more rarely. But still with cancel send and edit I seem to get double entries in the outbound :/ (I'll check how hard this is to fix.) Great :) -- Benny ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
[MlMt] edit unsent message in outbound always creates copy
Hi, I asked this before but it keeps failing ;/ Any message in outbound only provide Edit as new message that creates a copy instead of just letting me edit the outbound message. What am I doing wrong ? /max http://about.me/maxandersen ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Rearrange mailbox rules?
On 25 Aug 2015, at 0:04, Randall Meadows wrote: Is it possible to rearrange the list of rules in the mailbox Rules editor? No, not yet. The only workaround is to quit MailMate and do it manually by editing this file: ~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Mailboxes.plist Make a backup of the file first :-) Additionally, is it possible to tell MailMate to stop processing Rules after a rule's condition[s] succeed and an action is performed? No, it's an open [feature request](https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/546). -- Benny ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] edit unsent message in outbound always creates copy
On 25 Aug 2015, at 11:15, Max Rydahl Andersen wrote: I asked this before but it keeps failing ;/ Any message in outbound only provide Edit as new message that creates a copy instead of just letting me edit the outbound message. What am I doing wrong ? Nothing. I'm assuming this is when you have the machine offline and MailMate cannot send the messages yet? (At least, for the “Send Later” messages I have “Cancel Send and Edit” in the menu.) (I'll check how hard this is to fix.) -- Benny ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?
On 25 Aug 2015, at 10:58, David O'Donnell wrote: On 25 Aug 2015, at 7:03, Brian Scholl wrote: Also, a more theoretical postscript: It seems to me that Benny's reluctance to pursue any sort of .mbox export […] I can’t speak to the IMAP-*v*-POP3 debate, but I would really love the ability to export a series of messages as a .mbox file in the same format that Apple Mail does. Isn't mbox great: one always has to specify a particular tool's flavor... If you want a reasonably portable mbox on your Desktop containing the messages in a MM IMAP (not Smart) folder, it's easily done with a simple bit of shell calling the crufty old formail tool: cd ~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Messages/IMAP/[account@server]/[path-to-folder]/Messages/ for fname in *.eml ; do formail $fname ; done ~/Desktop/Exported.mbox If you want the delimiter lines' timestamps derived from Date headers instead of now, the conversion gets more arcane and will not like improper Date headers: for fname in *.eml; do formail -a Date: $fname ; done | sed '/^From /s/, \(..\) \(...\) \(\) \(..:..:..\) .*/ \2 \1 \4 \3/' ~/Desktop/Exported.mbox Unfortunately, there's no sound way to get the proper delivery date into the delimiter lines unless you are an IMAP client, so Mail.app does one thing unequivocally better than formail. Also, unlike Mail.app, formail uses (CORRECTLY) the Return-Path header (if present) to derive the delimiter line address instead of Mail.app's simple use of the From message header and only adds blank lines ahead of delimiter lines on an as-needed basis. So, while MailMate won't duplicate what Apple Mail does, one can get pretty close using the MailMate message store without MailMate doing the actual work. In addition to using SpamSieve on my Mac (which is quite good), I maintain my own mail server (Mac OS X 10.6.8, until I am forced to “upgrade”) It is mildly amusing to learn that, as it means I'm not alone and in respectable company. In my case the excuse is that the original Core Duo can't do 64-bit mode and so can't run 10.7 or later, and I can't bear to junk that old machine... (Tangent: Senior mail admins are insanely over-represented on this mailing list.) and use SpamAssassin there to try to intercept as much crud as possible *before* it gets to SpamSieve. Apple Mail produces the perfect .mbox files for feeding to SpamAssassin’s spam-learning routines, so periodically I have to haul Mail out, select all the junk that SpamAssassin needs to learn how to intercept, and File Save As… (raw source) to a file that I can then drag to the server and run learnspam against. I'm surprised that no one in this thread has yet mentioned the simple ability to select messages in a MM message list and drag them to a Finder window: a very fast way to create a file-per-message offline local archive. As someone who has retained email for 20+ years including a substantial spam corpus (it's a professional focus) I share the desire for a local, integrated, purely private, and reliable mail archive. Even though I have my own Dovecot server running on a machine in the same room as my main desktop, I don't keep my biggest archive there. Instead, after years of working with various tools on a semi-converted pile of Eudora almost-mbox files, I finally bought a license for Emailchemy (http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/index.html) a tool that can actually recover and convert Eudora's quirky Classic Mac format (CR-delimited mboxes with resource fork indexing and split attachments pointed to by HFS CNIDs) as well as just about any other mail format one might have into a variety of file-per-message and standard mbox formats INCLUDING a maildir-like tree with a trivial read-only IMAP interface meant to be used as a Import Server. Since my old archive is just that, I had Emailchemy do the conversion and run the Import Server for long enough to have MailMate import the whole tree as a new IMAP account. That account has been in offline mode in MM for a couple of years now, happily challenging the robustness of MailMate's indexing searching capabilities as a huge collection of very weird mail, much of it intentionally and maliciously in violation of any known standard. Works marvelously, except that MM eats a lot of RAM (unavoidable with 400k+ messages) and is a bit sluggish for some searches. Another approach I've played with but not really exercised hard is a zombie IMAP Account permanently offline as a local archive. The connection settings don't work and never have, but I can create folders and subfolders and MM creates the directories just as it would for a normal account. Benny has vaguely warned that this might not be a reliable approach, but I think that's only because it has no backend and ultimately would be lost if MM decided its local cache of messages was not to be trusted. Tags may not work also... I think to some degree the
Re: [MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?
On 25 Aug 2015, at 13:25, Muster Hans wrote: As far as I am aware the mail component of the $20 Apple OS Server product requires a fixed IP address, plus appropriate DNS entries of course. For direct incoming delivery to mail addresses your own domain, yes: as it is with any SMTP server. However, if you just want Server for the IMAP side of the mail service, i.e. somewhere to stash mail locally so you can remove it from dependence on an ISP's IMAP service, Server is happy to turn on its Mail service with nothing but a private IP (192.168.*, 10.* etc.) and never receive mail via SMTP. That's a bit wasteful of resources (i.e. you're running Postfix for no reason...) but it does give one a working Dovecot IMAP instance without having to read the copious Dovecot docs to figure out how much of it is entirely unneeded for a trivial deployment. ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?
On 25 Aug 2015, at 23:59, Bill Cole wrote: On 25 Aug 2015, at 13:25, Muster Hans wrote: As far as I am aware the mail component of the $20 Apple OS Server product requires a fixed IP address, plus appropriate DNS entries of course. For direct incoming delivery to mail addresses your own domain, yes: as it is with any SMTP server. However, if you just want Server for the IMAP side of the mail service, i.e. somewhere to stash mail locally so you can remove it from dependence on an ISP's IMAP service, Server is happy to turn on its Mail service with nothing but a private IP (192.168.*, 10.* etc.) and never receive mail via SMTP. That's a bit wasteful of resources (i.e. you're running Postfix for no reason...) but it does give one a working Dovecot IMAP instance without having to read the copious Dovecot docs to figure out how much of it is entirely unneeded for a trivial deployment. That sounds useful thanks, and with that knowledge I'm inclined to do battle with OS X Server again :-) ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] edit unsent message in outbound always creates copy
On 25 Aug 2015, at 12:34, Max Rydahl Andersen wrote: I have the cancel send and edit sometimes. But more rarely. But still with cancel send and edit I seem to get double entries in the outbound :/ I cannot reproduce this. Using “Send Later” and then “Cancel Send and Edit” does not generate a duplicate for me. Let me know if you can reproduce it. -- Benny ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?
On 25 Aug 2015, at 12:33, Brian Scholl wrote: (I will also say that the degree of transparency available about the status of MM's development -- in Benny's many quick replies in this list, plus the issue tracker -- seems like a *huge* plus.) My Inbox seems to tell a story about an increase of 1-2 emails per day of “open” issues... I am facing a single roadblock, though, that is the lack of support for any local message archiving. Having read the list archives extensively, I have the following two impressions: 1. A good number of people need/want this, in some form or another. [...] 2. But the probability of Benny adding this option anytime in the foreseeable future seems to be somewhere between very low and zero. [...] Your impressions are (more or less) correct. [work flow] So my plea to the list members is just this: what are my best options for doing this? 1. LOCAL EXPORT? Can I somehow export an IMAP folder from MM to any form of locally-accessible file/archive (such as an .mbox file)? It appears that this isn't possible, and this is what Benny isn't too keen on adding. That is not correct. I have simply never implemented it. *Partly* because I suspect I'll have issues with the `.mbox` format which is not a well defined standard. I'm afraid no matter how I implement it then I'll have reports about it failing to be imported in some other app and in the end I'll need options for every variant of the `.mbox` format. But I won't really know before it's implemented. It might not be that bad. Also, I mainly see the `.mbox` format as being about interoperability. From the perspective of MailMate, it's an obsolete file format. 2. SNEAKY OFFLINE ACCESS TO MM'S LOCAL IMAP FILES? *Don't do that.* Emails are saved in a nice folder hierarchy in standard raw form. One file per email. But you should never move, delete, or assume anything about these files. It's just nice to know if something goes horribly wrong and you need direct access to the emails. (You won't of course, because they should all be on IMAP ;-) ). 3. RUNNING MY OWN MAIL SERVER? Cons: Technically hard and if done on the local disk then it'll double the space usage. Pro: It works. 4. DIRECT EXPORTING TO EXTERNAL DATABASES/PROGRAMS? You can enable some of these programs in the Bundles preferences pane. The main problem is to keep the mailbox name, but something could perhaps be done about that. With the latest test version of MailMate you also have the option of simply exporting `.eml` files since emails can be searched via Spotlight. You could use mailbox rules to automatically save emails to a folder and delete them on IMAP, but (again) mailbox names might be a problem. It would be harder (but more flexible) to create a bundle command to do this. In fact, I should probably consider providing that by default. 5. LOCAL ARCHIVING TO MBOX FILES VIA A DIFFERENT EMAIL CLIENT? I'll just skip that one. I really am keen to start taking advantage of all MM has to offer, but having some form of local archive is really non-negotiable for me. Well, you already know that I always question this starting point... :-) I think your best options are: 1. Force me to make exporting `.eml` files easier and then use Spotlight (or the Finder) to search locally archived emails. 2. Setup a dummy IMAP account in MailMate which is always offline and then see if you can use some variant of what I suggest in [this ticket](https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/733). I hope this helps a bit. -- Benny ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] edit unsent message in outbound always creates copy
Are there any other mail clients or instances of mailmate (on other computers) that touch the draft? -- David Green Sent from mobile device. Please excuse any typographical errors. On Aug 25, 2015, at 4:15 AM, Max Rydahl Andersen max.ander...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I asked this before but it keeps failing ;/ Any message in outbound only provide Edit as new message that creates a copy instead of just letting me edit the outbound message. What am I doing wrong ? /max http://about.me/maxandersen ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?
Also, a more theoretical postscript: It seems to me that Benny's reluctance to pursue any sort of .mbox export or local folder option stems from the notion that such things are intrinsically in opposition to the entire notion/purpose of IMAP. For example, in one of the ticket replies about such things once upon a time, he wrote: MailMate really is IMAP only and I don't have any current plans to change that. Essentially (if you think about it), 'On My Mac' support is the same as supporting POP3. Messages are only temporarily stored on the server. That doesn't seem right to me. Embracing the IMAP worldview but then also limiting the size and complexity of online accounts by periodically allowing them to be culled to local-only long-term-storage archives doesn't feel the same to me as just using POP3 in a different way. Conversely, it seems like allowing for a local .mbox export (or something like that) in MM wouldn't be some sort of betrayal of its underlying nature. Rather, it would just be a way for users to adapt true day-to-day IMAP usage to a longer-term archiving practice. (A concrete example: I teach classes at a university, and during each semester I will accrete huge online IMAP folders with emails relating to those classes. But then once the relevant semester has finished, I just hate the idea of keeping those folders online forever. Even just the sheer *number* of such folders would become awkward and distracting over time, not to mention the messages they contain. But I also don't just want to delete those messages forever -- since maybe once per year I'll have a need to dive into a previous semester's folders to find something. So this is practice some sort of betrayal of how I'm supposed to use IMAP?) Do others feel similarly? Am I just thinking about this the wrong way? -Brian Brian Scholl wrote: Please pardon the length of this plea for help, and please pardon my naivete. (I am switching not only from another client to MailMate, but from POP to IMAP at the same time -- with all the changes in workflow and mindset that entails -- and I am probably under the grip of some false assumptions.) I have already convinced myself that I must switch to MM for all sorts of reasons (most of them involving customizability), so that is now a foregone conclusion. (I will also say that the degree of transparency available about the status of MM's development -- in Benny's many quick replies in this list, plus the issue tracker -- seems like a *huge* plus.) I am facing a single roadblock, though, that is the lack of support for any local message archiving. Having read the list archives extensively, I have the following two impressions: 1. A good number of people need/want this, in some form or another. (It keeps coming up on the list semi-regularly, and by my count it has occasioned at least 6 different tickets over years, etc.) For some people, this is a need driven by server/account size constraints. For others, it is simply a workflow-related preference. And this has led at least some users to cook up fairly obscure, complicated, and/or kluge-y solutions (such as Fredrik Jonsson's method of setting up and running a local IMAP server to implement local archiving). 2. But the probability of Benny adding this option anytime in the foreseeable future seems to be somewhere between very low and zero. (He has generally flagged these sorts of tickets as 'bluesky'.) I have the impression that this is not because it's especially technically challenging, but because he's philosophically opposed to it. (Most of his replies in the relevant list threads involve trying to get people to stop wanting this in the first place, and/or to ask for IMAP quota increases instead, etc.) I don't resent this perspective at all, but I nevertheless need some workaround since this is nonnegotiable for me -- and the purpose of this message is to try to clarify my options. What I want, in brief, is this: I want to use MM to sort my incoming mail into various IMAP folders (probably about 20 of them, and probably using some combination of filters/rules and manual message-moving via custom keybindings). Then I'll interact with my mail on a daily basis via those folders along with many additional MM Smart folders. Then, every so often (e.g. once per year) -- when some of those IMAP folders get huge and/or old, I want to archive them to some form of local-only folder/storage, such that (1) I can then mass-delete all of the messages from those IMAP folders (so that there are no longer any copies stored online), at which point those particular folders will just start filling up again from scratch with new incoming mail; but (2) I can still occasionally browse the local-only archived messages somehow (even if this is done in some other program such as DevonThink or EagleFiler -- though obviously it would be nice to be able to do this in MM itself). I should also
Re: [MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?
Thanks to everyone for the quick and very helpful responses. A few thoughts and followup questions: Clearly there are plenty of workarounds to try for local-only archiving, so I'll make something work. I'm still hesitant to try any of the local IMAP server options (and I have great server-side SPAM handling already through my university), but it sounds to me like my best bet for creating a long-term-storage archive might just be to export .eml files directly from MM (via the EF bundle, via dragging-to-the-finder, or by stealing them from MM's private ~/Library/ directory) and then have EagleFiler translate/collate them into an .mbox archive for long term storage. As long as that will work for folders of ~ 1000 messages at a time (and will preserve the dates, etc.), that sounds fine. (And I'm also glad to learn from Bill Cole about the formail shell option to produce the .mbox file directly; I'll play with the date stuff and see how close I can get with that too.) But I do hold out some hope that maybe we can still convince Benny to just hold his nose and provide an IMAP-folder-to-.mbox command in MM itself. Maybe this will happen if we all just keep politely asking for this -- especially if we intimate that otherwise we will be using Mail.app as a MM utility, and/or that we will be poking around in MM's local files despite the warnings? Benny wrote: Instead the (very similar) need for local messages comes up quite often. The best argument for that is privacy, but (some day) I would like to solve that problem in a different way (encryption). I also resonate with the privacy argument. And I'm not sure about others, but at least for me this isn't the primary driver of the local-archive request: even if MM had some great encryption option, I'd still want a local archive option just as much. Benny wrote: I'm afraid no matter how I implement it then I'll have reports about it failing to be imported in some other app and in the end I'll need options for every variant of the `.mbox` format. But I won't really know before it's implemented. It might not be that bad. It's also possible that the people who want this particular feature will be able to cope with different .mbox formats by themselves (or that people will be able to easily use other utilities such as Emailalchemy to do any further translation that might be necessary)? I worry instead that if you provide an IMAP-folder-to-local-.mbox export command after all, you'll just drown in a chorus of Thank you!s... Bill Cole wrote: As someone who has retained email for 20+ years including a substantial spam corpus (it's a professional focus) I share the desire for a local, integrated, purely private, and reliable mail archive. That seems like another great example. Benny, would you really just recommend that Bill keep 20 years of SPAM online? (I'm worried that the answer will just be an enthusiastic 'yes!', but that seems like an unacceptable option to me.) Benny wrote: 2. Setup a dummy IMAP account in MailMate which is always offline and then see if you can use some variant of what I suggest in [this ticket](https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/733). Has anyone made this work well? I haven't seen anyone on the list or in that ticket reply that this has worked for them. (In the ticket Benny notes that he hasn't actually tried it. And it sounds like Bill Cole tried this but didn't test it fully?) Michael Tsai wrote: Currently, MailMate sends EagleFiler .eml files: http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/help/importing-mail-from-mai However, you can merge them into mbox files for greater efficiency if you want: http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/help/merge-mailboxes-message Do you have any thoughts about whether this would work for bulk archiving -- e.g. if I wanted to take the entire contents of a ~ 1000-message IMAP folder, send them all in one step to EagleFiler from MM, and then convert the results (and only those results) into a single .mbox file? (And does this option successfully preserve all of the dates, unlike the simple version of Bill Cole's formail shell command?) If so, I'm tempted to just use this (especially since this would mean never having to open Mail.app). (And thanks for the quick reply, Michael; I will also eagerly be buying an EagleFiler license shortly!) Bill Cole wrote: I'm surprised that no one in this thread has yet mentioned the simple ability to select messages in a MM message list and drag them to a Finder window: a very fast way to create a file-per-message offline local archive. Same question: would this work well (and in a date-preserving way, etc.) for ~ 1000 messages at a time, with the results then imported into EagleFiler and transmuted into a single .mbox? But it seems like my best bet really might be to just skip the export step (via the EF bundle or dragging-to-finder or creating a zombie/offline IMAP account) altogether, and just periodically steal the archive
Re: [MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?
On Aug 25, 2015, at 6:33 AM, Brian Scholl bjsch...@gmail.com wrote: When others on the list have talked about using EagleFiler to archive their mail, for example, how do you get the messages from MM into EagleFiler? Currently, MailMate sends EagleFiler .eml files: http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/help/importing-mail-from-mai However, you can merge them into mbox files for greater efficiency if you want: http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/help/merge-mailboxes-message 5. LOCAL ARCHIVING TO MBOX FILES VIA A DIFFERENT EMAIL CLIENT? Back in January on this list, Scott McIntyre mentioned in passing that it is possible to use MM for everyday email, but then occasionally run Mail.app to access the same IMAP account, use that to save/translate the folder to a local mbox file, and then import that mbox file into DevonThink or EagleFiler for long term access. This should be easy. You can just set up Apple Mail to use the same server info as MailMate, and it will stay in sync via IMAP. Then just select the messages you want to import and press EagleFiler's capture key: http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/help/importing-mail-from-app No need to find the files in Mail or use its mbox export, which is buggy. --Michael -- Michael Tsai C-Command Software ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
