Re: [MlMt] Preserving tags

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 13 Feb 2018, at 0:16, Rick Holzgrafe wrote:

This means that we need a way to preserve our archived mail. That’s 
easy enough—EagleFiler will do it, or we could just make a Finder 
copy of our cache folders. But these mechanisms do not preserve the 
tags (even though both EagleFiler and the Finder do support tagging), 
so we will lose all of our carefully-built-up organization.


Is there any way to preserve not just the mail, but also the tags that 
we have applied in Mailmate? I have explored the Application Support > 
Mailmate folder, but as far as I can tell the tag info is not stored 
there, except for a handy list of all the tag names.


It's unfortunately not easily accessed. Ideally, MailMate would map its 
IMAP-based tags to file system tags, but I simply haven't had the time 
to implement that. This would also preserve the tags if simply 
exporting/dragging emails to a disk folder.


As far as I know, we won’t be able to simply transfer our mail from 
our own server to a hosted server.


Moving emails between IMAP servers preserves tags as long as the 
destination server supports IMAP keywords.


--
Benny
___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate

Re: [MlMt] Preserving tags

[Fredrik Jonsson]

Angelo Machils 2018-02-13 8:37 wrote:

Just remember that dovecot is only part of the equation, you also need 
to configure stuff like postfix (or exim), spamassassin etc.


If you want to store mail locally on your own computer then only Dovecot 
is needed.


If you want to run a proper mail server then you are correct.

I recently posted my Ansible role for a mail server and wrote a bit 
about it.




Fredrik
___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate

Re: [MlMt] Preserving tags

[Angelo Machils]

Hello,

Just remember that dovecot is only part of the equation, you also need 
to configure stuff like postfix (or exim), spamassassin etc. On *nix, 
there is a package called iredmail that makes installing (and 
configuring) a lot easier. Perhaps you could also look at something like 
Zimbra, very easy to install and maintain and there are hosted versions 
out there. Zimbra supports tags, although I have no experience in how 
far they are compatible with mailmate. You could test with zmailcloud, 
this is one of the hosted Zimbra installs and they offer a free trail.


---
Regards,

Angelo Machils

On 13 Feb 2018, at 9:11, Rick Holzgrafe wrote:

You’re the second person to suggest running a local Dovecot server. 
One of the bits of good news in all this was that I was looking 
forward to letting experts worry about the server stuff. I’m not an 
expert, and maintaining our own server has been a nightmare. So I’m 
a bit allergic to the notion of continuing to run even a limited 
server.


But y’all are saying it’s “fairly simple”, and Fredrik Jonsson 
has contributed a web page he wrote that explains how to do it in 
detail. So thanks to you both, and I will definitely keep it in mind!


On 12 Feb 2018, at 23:05, Bill Cole wrote:


On 12 Feb 2018, at 18:16, Rick Holzgrafe wrote:

Is there any way to preserve not just the mail, but also the tags 
that we have applied in Mailmate? I have explored the Application 
Support > Mailmate folder, but as far as I can tell the tag info is 
not stored there, except for a handy list of all the tag names.


The tags are stored on the server as IMAP "keywords" a.k.a. "flags."

This is a standard part of the IMAP protocol, but support for 
user-defined keywords/flags is sparse. MacOS X Server uses Dovecot as 
its IMAP server and so supports an arbitrary collection of keywords. 
Many email service providers (e.g. Microsoft) have IMAP keyword 
support so limited that it might as well not exist. Others (e.g. 
Google) conflate flags/keywords and folder names, so massive 
weirdness can occur.


BOTTOM LINE: You cannot count on a mailbox storage & access provider 
to support existing MailMate tags. If they use Dovecot, Cyrus, or 
Courier, you may be able to just drag messages across and let MM do 
the work. Otherwise? Who knows.


POSSIBLE SOLUTION: It's fairly simple to yank the mailboxes out of 
the MacOS X Server mailstore and drop them into a MacPorts (or 
Homebrew or handmade) installation of Dovecot.

___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate


— Rick Holzgrafe
   r...@semicolon.com
   http://www.semicolon.com

___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate

Re: [MlMt] Preserving tags

[Rick Holzgrafe]

You’re the second person to suggest running a local Dovecot server. 
One of the bits of good news in all this was that I was looking forward 
to letting experts worry about the server stuff. I’m not an expert, 
and maintaining our own server has been a nightmare. So I’m a bit 
allergic to the notion of continuing to run even a limited server.


But y’all are saying it’s “fairly simple”, and Fredrik Jonsson 
has contributed a web page he wrote that explains how to do it in 
detail. So thanks to you both, and I will definitely keep it in mind!


On 12 Feb 2018, at 23:05, Bill Cole wrote:


On 12 Feb 2018, at 18:16, Rick Holzgrafe wrote:

Is there any way to preserve not just the mail, but also the tags 
that we have applied in Mailmate? I have explored the Application 
Support > Mailmate folder, but as far as I can tell the tag info is 
not stored there, except for a handy list of all the tag names.


The tags are stored on the server as IMAP "keywords" a.k.a. "flags."

This is a standard part of the IMAP protocol, but support for 
user-defined keywords/flags is sparse. MacOS X Server uses Dovecot as 
its IMAP server and so supports an arbitrary collection of keywords. 
Many email service providers (e.g. Microsoft) have IMAP keyword 
support so limited that it might as well not exist. Others (e.g. 
Google) conflate flags/keywords and folder names, so massive weirdness 
can occur.


BOTTOM LINE: You cannot count on a mailbox storage & access provider 
to support existing MailMate tags. If they use Dovecot, Cyrus, or 
Courier, you may be able to just drag messages across and let MM do 
the work. Otherwise? Who knows.


POSSIBLE SOLUTION: It's fairly simple to yank the mailboxes out of the 
MacOS X Server mailstore and drop them into a MacPorts (or Homebrew or 
handmade) installation of Dovecot.

___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate


— Rick Holzgrafe
   r...@semicolon.com
   http://www.semicolon.com

___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate

Re: [MlMt] Preserving tags

[Bill Cole]

On 12 Feb 2018, at 18:16, Rick Holzgrafe wrote:

Is there any way to preserve not just the mail, but also the tags that 
we have applied in Mailmate? I have explored the Application Support > 
Mailmate folder, but as far as I can tell the tag info is not stored 
there, except for a handy list of all the tag names.


The tags are stored on the server as IMAP "keywords" a.k.a. "flags."

This is a standard part of the IMAP protocol, but support for 
user-defined keywords/flags is sparse. MacOS X Server uses Dovecot as 
its IMAP server and so supports an arbitrary collection of keywords. 
Many email service providers (e.g. Microsoft) have IMAP keyword support 
so limited that it might as well not exist. Others (e.g. Google) 
conflate flags/keywords and folder names, so massive weirdness can 
occur.


BOTTOM LINE: You cannot count on a mailbox storage & access provider to 
support existing MailMate tags. If they use Dovecot, Cyrus, or Courier, 
you may be able to just drag messages across and let MM do the work. 
Otherwise? Who knows.


POSSIBLE SOLUTION: It's fairly simple to yank the mailboxes out of the 
MacOS X Server mailstore and drop them into a MacPorts (or Homebrew or 
handmade) installation of Dovecot.

___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate

Re: [MlMt] Preserving tags

[Fredrik Jonsson]

Rick Holzgrafe 2018-02-13 0:46 wrote:

We are still among those who, in spite of Benny’s advice, would like 
to keep a local (and properly tagged) mail archive, so I’m still 
interested in finding a way to do that. But it’s good to know that 
we have at least one solution likely to work for us; thanks for that!


I have been running a local Dovecot for that purpose for years, works 
really well.




Fredrik
___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate

Re: [MlMt] Preserving tags

[Steven M. Bellovin]

MacOS Server uses Dovecot; if your new mail host runs Dovecot, I think 
that the tags will transfer.


If they're friendly, you'll be able to copy over the Dovecot 
directories. However, when I did that on a (non-Apple) Dovecot server I 
run, I had to delete the dovecot.index* files.


On 12 Feb 2018, at 18:46, Rick Holzgrafe wrote:

Thanks, Paul. That might work, if our hosting service will support our 
large volumes of saved mail (probably yes, if I throw money at them) 
and if their server fully supports tags (I’m sure I can find one 
that does).


We are still among those who, in spite of Benny’s advice, would like 
to keep a local (and properly tagged) mail archive, so I’m still 
interested in finding a way to do that. But it’s good to know that 
we have at least one solution likely to work for us; thanks for that!


On 12 Feb 2018, at 15:38, Paul Sture wrote:

One of the beauties of IMAP is that if you point your mail client at 
two servers, you can drag existing mails from one server to the 
other.  I initially did this to transfer stuff from a POP 
server/client setup into IMAP with a different email provider.


Where both servers are remote, everything which isn't cached locally 
has to come down to your local machine, then out to the other one, so 
it can take quite some time, but that's just a matter of patience.  
Since you use your own MacOS server plus MailMate, the incoming leg 
of that journey should be trivial.


As far as the nitty gritty of the transfer goes, the last time I did 
this was several years ago, but as far as I recall I created a dummy 
account on the target IMAP system to dump everything into, then 
created each account in turn and moved them into the right place.  
The only catch I recall was deciding when to change my MX records to 
point at the new server, and ensuring that no emails arriving in the 
transition period got lost.  Copious double checking satisfied me 
there.


On 13 Feb 2018, at 0:16, Rick Holzgrafe wrote:

We have a small email server box of our own, running Apple MacOS 
Server. We access it with Mailmate, and we use Mailmate’s tags 
feature heavily to organize our tens of thousands of messages.


Apple has announced that it will discontinue the mail server 
feature. We are going to have to move to a hosted server somewhere. 
(Helpful people: Please don’t respond with suggestions on how to 
avoid this move. I’ve been through all that already, thanks.) We 
intend to continue to use Mailmate after the move. (We really like 
Mailmate.)


This means that we need a way to preserve our archived mail. 
That’s easy enough—EagleFiler will do it, or we could just make 
a Finder copy of our cache folders. But these mechanisms do not 
preserve the tags (even though both EagleFiler and the Finder do 
support tagging), so we will lose all of our carefully-built-up 
organization.


Is there any way to preserve not just the mail, but also the tags 
that we have applied in Mailmate? I have explored the Application 
Support > Mailmate folder, but as far as I can tell the tag info is 
not stored there, except for a handy list of all the tag names.


As far as I know, we won’t be able to simply transfer our mail 
from our own server to a hosted server.


I’m a programmer; if I know where the info is kept, I might even 
be able to build some custom software to do the job for us… 
although I expect the task of (say) building my own “mail 
client” just to download mail and tags is pretty daunting.


Thanks for any help!

— Rick Holzgrafe
   r...@semicolon.com
   http://www.semicolon.com

___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate

___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate


— Rick Holzgrafe
   r...@semicolon.com
   http://www.semicolon.com

___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate




--Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb


___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate

Re: [MlMt] Preserving tags

[Rick Holzgrafe]

Thanks, Paul. That might work, if our hosting service will support our 
large volumes of saved mail (probably yes, if I throw money at them) and 
if their server fully supports tags (I’m sure I can find one that 
does).


We are still among those who, in spite of Benny’s advice, would like 
to keep a local (and properly tagged) mail archive, so I’m still 
interested in finding a way to do that. But it’s good to know that we 
have at least one solution likely to work for us; thanks for that!


On 12 Feb 2018, at 15:38, Paul Sture wrote:

One of the beauties of IMAP is that if you point your mail client at 
two servers, you can drag existing mails from one server to the other. 
 I initially did this to transfer stuff from a POP server/client setup 
into IMAP with a different email provider.


Where both servers are remote, everything which isn't cached locally 
has to come down to your local machine, then out to the other one, so 
it can take quite some time, but that's just a matter of patience.  
Since you use your own MacOS server plus MailMate, the incoming leg of 
that journey should be trivial.


As far as the nitty gritty of the transfer goes, the last time I did 
this was several years ago, but as far as I recall I created a dummy 
account on the target IMAP system to dump everything into, then 
created each account in turn and moved them into the right place.  The 
only catch I recall was deciding when to change my MX records to point 
at the new server, and ensuring that no emails arriving in the 
transition period got lost.  Copious double checking satisfied me 
there.


On 13 Feb 2018, at 0:16, Rick Holzgrafe wrote:

We have a small email server box of our own, running Apple MacOS 
Server. We access it with Mailmate, and we use Mailmate’s tags 
feature heavily to organize our tens of thousands of messages.


Apple has announced that it will discontinue the mail server feature. 
We are going to have to move to a hosted server somewhere. (Helpful 
people: Please don’t respond with suggestions on how to avoid this 
move. I’ve been through all that already, thanks.) We intend to 
continue to use Mailmate after the move. (We really like Mailmate.)


This means that we need a way to preserve our archived mail. That’s 
easy enough—EagleFiler will do it, or we could just make a Finder 
copy of our cache folders. But these mechanisms do not preserve the 
tags (even though both EagleFiler and the Finder do support tagging), 
so we will lose all of our carefully-built-up organization.


Is there any way to preserve not just the mail, but also the tags 
that we have applied in Mailmate? I have explored the Application 
Support > Mailmate folder, but as far as I can tell the tag info is 
not stored there, except for a handy list of all the tag names.


As far as I know, we won’t be able to simply transfer our mail from 
our own server to a hosted server.


I’m a programmer; if I know where the info is kept, I might even be 
able to build some custom software to do the job for us… although I 
expect the task of (say) building my own “mail client” just to 
download mail and tags is pretty daunting.


Thanks for any help!

— Rick Holzgrafe
   r...@semicolon.com
   http://www.semicolon.com

___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate

___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate


— Rick Holzgrafe
   r...@semicolon.com
   http://www.semicolon.com

___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate

Re: [MlMt] Preserving tags

[Paul Sture]

One of the beauties of IMAP is that if you point your mail client at two 
servers, you can drag existing mails from one server to the other.  I 
initially did this to transfer stuff from a POP server/client setup into 
IMAP with a different email provider.


Where both servers are remote, everything which isn't cached locally has 
to come down to your local machine, then out to the other one, so it can 
take quite some time, but that's just a matter of patience.  Since you 
use your own MacOS server plus MailMate, the incoming leg of that 
journey should be trivial.


As far as the nitty gritty of the transfer goes, the last time I did 
this was several years ago, but as far as I recall I created a dummy 
account on the target IMAP system to dump everything into, then created 
each account in turn and moved them into the right place.  The only 
catch I recall was deciding when to change my MX records to point at the 
new server, and ensuring that no emails arriving in the transition 
period got lost.  Copious double checking satisfied me there.


On 13 Feb 2018, at 0:16, Rick Holzgrafe wrote:

We have a small email server box of our own, running Apple MacOS 
Server. We access it with Mailmate, and we use Mailmate’s tags 
feature heavily to organize our tens of thousands of messages.


Apple has announced that it will discontinue the mail server feature. 
We are going to have to move to a hosted server somewhere. (Helpful 
people: Please don’t respond with suggestions on how to avoid this 
move. I’ve been through all that already, thanks.) We intend to 
continue to use Mailmate after the move. (We really like Mailmate.)


This means that we need a way to preserve our archived mail. That’s 
easy enough—EagleFiler will do it, or we could just make a Finder 
copy of our cache folders. But these mechanisms do not preserve the 
tags (even though both EagleFiler and the Finder do support tagging), 
so we will lose all of our carefully-built-up organization.


Is there any way to preserve not just the mail, but also the tags that 
we have applied in Mailmate? I have explored the Application Support > 
Mailmate folder, but as far as I can tell the tag info is not stored 
there, except for a handy list of all the tag names.


As far as I know, we won’t be able to simply transfer our mail from 
our own server to a hosted server.


I’m a programmer; if I know where the info is kept, I might even be 
able to build some custom software to do the job for us… although I 
expect the task of (say) building my own “mail client” just to 
download mail and tags is pretty daunting.


Thanks for any help!

— Rick Holzgrafe
   r...@semicolon.com
   http://www.semicolon.com

___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate

___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate

[MlMt] Preserving tags

[Rick Holzgrafe]

We have a small email server box of our own, running Apple MacOS Server. 
We access it with Mailmate, and we use Mailmate’s tags feature heavily 
to organize our tens of thousands of messages.


Apple has announced that it will discontinue the mail server feature. We 
are going to have to move to a hosted server somewhere. (Helpful people: 
Please don’t respond with suggestions on how to avoid this move. 
I’ve been through all that already, thanks.) We intend to continue to 
use Mailmate after the move. (We really like Mailmate.)


This means that we need a way to preserve our archived mail. That’s 
easy enough—EagleFiler will do it, or we could just make a Finder copy 
of our cache folders. But these mechanisms do not preserve the tags 
(even though both EagleFiler and the Finder do support tagging), so we 
will lose all of our carefully-built-up organization.


Is there any way to preserve not just the mail, but also the tags that 
we have applied in Mailmate? I have explored the Application Support > 
Mailmate folder, but as far as I can tell the tag info is not stored 
there, except for a handy list of all the tag names.


As far as I know, we won’t be able to simply transfer our mail from 
our own server to a hosted server.


I’m a programmer; if I know where the info is kept, I might even be 
able to build some custom software to do the job for us… although I 
expect the task of (say) building my own “mail client” just to 
download mail and tags is pretty daunting.


Thanks for any help!

— Rick Holzgrafe
   r...@semicolon.com
   http://www.semicolon.com

___
mailmate mailing list
mailmate@lists.freron.com
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate