#733 ✓bluesky
Steve Fenwick

Archive on Mac only?

Reported by Steve Fenwick | April 27th, 2014 @ 04:13 PM

At some point, I want to transfer messages from my IMAP account to my Mac. I still want to be able to access the messages through the mail client. Eudora and Mail both have the concept of "on my Mac" (either by this name or implicitly", but I don't see how to do that in MailMate.

Comments and changes to this ticket

  • Chauncey

    Chauncey July 22nd, 2014 @ 09:13 PM

    I too would love to see this become a feature in MailMate. I know how to archive messages within Mail.app but haven't done so simply because I quite often have a need to open older messages and don't want to search between two separate locations.

  • benny

    benny July 30th, 2014 @ 01:05 PM

    • State changed from “new” to “bluesky”

    Sorry about the late reply on this one. 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.

    I'm not going to say “never”, but I'll mark this ticket as bluesky to emphasize that this is far from the top of my list.

    That said, MailMate is quite flexible and I believe it's possible to “hack” an “On My Mac” mailbox. This can be done using an offline IMAP mailbox either inside a real IMAP account or inside a dummy offline IMAP account (the latter is probably best to avoid accidentally taking it online). I haven't tried this, but here we go:

    • Enable 2.0 features in the General preferences pane.
    • Create an IMAP account named “On My Mac”. Set “dummy.example.com” as IMAP server name and a “dummy” username. Click “Add”.
    • Select the IMAP account and right-click to do “New IMAP Mailbox in On My Mac”. Name it, e.g., “Local Archive”.
    • Also create “Deleted Messages”.
    • Also take account explicitly offline (to avoid MailMate trying to connect to the server).
    • Double-click the icon of the new “Local Archive” mailbox to open the mailbox editor.
    • Go to the “Rules” pane.
    • Add a rule which only has actions. First, it should “Copy to Mailbox” with the same mailbox as destination. Then it should move to “Deleted Messages” twice.

    That looks a lot more complicated than it is, but the end result should be that you can move messages to “Local Archive” and then they are both moved to this mailbox and deleted on the IMAP server. The strange rule-side-stepping-copy-stuff at the end is because if the messages were simply moved then they would never be deleted from the original IMAP server. MailMate is very careful about never deleting anything server-side until after it is certain that the messages exist on the destination IMAP server. This requires the destination to be online.

    When messages are in the offline mailbox then they can be moved into other offline mailboxes without all the side-stepping.

    Note that MailMate does not officially support local messages only and if you do the above then don't look at me if you loose messages due to a local crash caused or not caused by MailMate. There is no longer a server backup.

    If you try it then please let me know if the above actually works (or not) or if you find a better/cleaner solution.

  • Steve Fenwick

    Steve Fenwick August 3rd, 2014 @ 12:41 AM

    I tried this, and got stuck at this step:

    Add a rule which only has actions. First, it should “Copy to Mailbox” with the same mailbox as destination.

    The "Local Archive" mailbox under the new "On My Mac" source is greyed out. See attached screenshot.

  • Steve Fenwick
  • Steve Fenwick

    Steve Fenwick August 3rd, 2014 @ 12:51 AM

    It may not be necessary to go further. It looks like I can manually copy from my online IMAP inbox to this new Local Archive account. Search appears to be finding it in both places (for a copy). If that's the case, then I can do the backup I need.

  • benny

    benny August 3rd, 2014 @ 09:04 AM

    The screenshot is surprising. I'm not seeing that. Does it persist after putting a message inside the mailbox?

    Be careful doing these copies manually. If you “move” instead of “copy” then MailMate can never complete the “move” (as described), but the GUI currently does not show you this (it would be nice if it did).

  • babel

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