#1621 new
Ingo Lantschner

Edit an existing message

Reported by Ingo Lantschner | December 27th, 2016 @ 07:23 PM

I started to use MailMate for storing notes and websnippets on an IMAP-Account. This somehow an replacement for Evernote with the advantage that I can have an IMAP-server completely under my control whereas evernote stores all my notes and thoughts somewhere in cleartext. While this works mostly fine thanks to the tags-support, I find the editing of such "notes" cumbersome.

Ok, the IMAP protocol does not support to change an existing message[1]. So what I do is "Edit as a new message", send the new message again to my archive-account and delete the old one.

Do you think you could develop an update-command in MailMate which does all of this in one command? Interesting enough: If I save a message (draft) I can edit this message later. Looking into the raw-message I see, that each save changes the UUID. So somehow this feature seems to exists already.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16945041/imap-editing-a-draft-or...

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • benny

    benny December 28th, 2016 @ 06:12 PM

    You are correct that the basic functionality, more or less, exists in MailMate. Recently I also added the ability to remove attachments from existing emails and this is also implicitly the same as editing an existing message and re-upload it to the server (and deleting the old copy).

    Wouldn't it be possible for you to simple keep these emails in the Drafts state. You can still move them to other mailboxes and editing would just be done by double-clicking them. Am I missing something there?

    (I would like a feature myself which allowed adding notes to any email, but that's a different story.)

  • Ingo Lantschner

    Ingo Lantschner December 30th, 2016 @ 01:48 PM

    Wouldn't it be possible for you to simple keep these emails in the Drafts state.

    My idea is to deliver these "notes" (technically they are e-mail message) by sending them to a specific e-mail address (e.g. incoming@archive.mydomain.com) from various devices. Every device and application has an option for sharing content by e-mail. But not each of them allows to save an e-mail as draft I guess.

    The configuration of the devices used to deliver the "notes" would require exactly one secure smtp-server (under my control). This SMTP server would forward any non-archive message to other, externally managed smtp-servers but store the ones for the archive locally. So my own SMTP-server would not host my usual mailboxes because I need some of them 24/7 available which is really difficult to achieve without a 3rd-party (Fastmail in my case). The only mailbox hosted by my own smtp-server would be this archive-mailbox. Reading and editing the notes would be done with MailMate over IMAPS. Since the connection between the sharing device and my own SMTP-IMAP-server would be secured by an TLS-certicicate it would be really secure connection (both an encrypted line and authenticated end-points).

    I would like a feature myself which allowed adding notes to any email, but that's a different story.

    Yes, I have read this issue #813 - I would like to have that too ;-) And it would be useful for such an archive-mailbox too. But yes, it is a different story.

    Thanks for your thoughts and efforts!

  • benny

    benny December 30th, 2016 @ 01:51 PM

    You could try creating a tag mapped to \Draft. Then add this tag to any emails coming into this notes mailbox. The only problem is that I'm not sure MailMate would always allow you to edit them (this is because the draft format is not standardized), but maybe I could do something to improve this part.

  • Ingo Lantschner

    Ingo Lantschner December 30th, 2016 @ 04:26 PM

    hmh, that seems to work in most cases - a big step forward - thanks!

    But some messages are not allowed to edit - the menu-point "Edit as new message" is displayed instead of "Edit draft", if this message is selected.

    I have two messages with same subject: One of them has been delivered with MailMate (which just copies the URL into the message-body) the other delivered with AppleMail which copies also the HTML of the destination-page. The one from MailMate with only the URL can be edited fine after adding the \Draft tag. The other can't be edited. I'll attach both of them.

    (Can't upload, quota reached, you'll find them here: https://cloud.lantschner.name/owncloud/public.php?service=files&amp... )

  • Nicholas Sloan

    Nicholas Sloan January 8th, 2019 @ 06:07 PM

    I am new to MailMate, so forgive me if I have missed something, but using a draft as a note seems to me a very satisfactory interim solution to this problem. As Benny says, drafts can be edited and resaved while remaining in the same mailbox as the original message, and they remain within the thread from which they were originally forwarded. I am also finding that they synch across devices, though they only remain editable in MM.

    I have enhanced my message-notes by giving them a Note tag which is tied to a colour style, so I can immediately distinguish “notes” from messages. I also have a KM macro to forward the selected email (with no To: address), tag it, clear the text and select the text field ready for editing. After writing the note, it only remains to move it out of the Drafts mailbox so that it rejoins the conversation.

  • Ingo Lantschner

    Ingo Lantschner January 21st, 2019 @ 09:06 AM

    Thanks Nicholas that is a possible workaround in some situations. (In others not, e.g. if I send an e-mail into my archive-mailbox from some UI which does not support drafts or where the drafts-mailbox is configured wrong or is not configurable at all.)

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