Freron MailMate

Comments and changes to this ticket

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  benny March 5th, 2011 @ 10:00 PM

  • State changed from “new” to “bluesky”
  • Assigned user set to “benny”

  First of all, thanks for trying out MailMate.

  Yes, “Archive” stores a message in an Archive mailbox within the same IMAP account. An export function (probably to the .mbox format) is also planned since it is frequently requested by users.

  Note that MailMate is a so-called offline IMAP client. This means that when offline you have access to all of your messages, that is, MailMate keeps a copy of all messages locally.

  Your main problem is therefore that you do not have an IMAP account with enough space for your mail. In my opinion, the best solution would be to get such an IMAP account. This could be by running an IMAP server locally if you insist on not having the messages on a remote server.

  You can also simulate having a local mailbox by creating an IMAP mailbox that you explicitly take offline. You can then import messages into it without having the messages uploaded to the server.

  As you have seen, MailMate is designed for IMAP. I'm sorry if that is a deal breaker. I do appreciate the time you spent on trying MailMate. Local messages may be a feature in the future, but it is far from a high priority.

  I've marked the ticket “bluesky” in order to not promise something I am not currently planning to make. (You can still reply to this ticket if you like.)

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  Jeff April 8th, 2011 @ 04:59 PM

  Thanks for the reply.

  I run a small company and I like to keep archives of all my correspondence. As a result I have thousands e-mails going back to 2003, many of which include PDF proposals, reports, invoices, job site photos etc. When I attempted to import my archive to MailMate, it began uploading mail from 2003 back to my server. I don't see the point in having thousands of emails with large attachments archived on the server. I would like to keep a copy on my main computer however. Since all emails are already stored locally, could there not be an option to delete the archived mail from the server AND move the local copy to a designated local archive folder in addition to the current option of moving the email to an archive folder on the server? It seems like an easy thing to do...A checkbox option to store archives locally or on server perhaps?

  Jeff

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  benny April 8th, 2011 @ 09:43 PM

  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this boils down to the fact that
  you do not want your archive of messages to be located on the server.
  Why is this? (I'm curious.)

  MailMate is for IMAP only and the whole point of IMAP is to have
  messages on the server (as opposed to POP3). For MailMate it is not more
  efficient to have messages locally instead of on the server since
  MailMate always has a local copy of server messages. Moving messages
  between mailboxes on the server are also efficient operations. MailMate
  even works in full when offline and changes are synchronized when going
  online.

  The task of uploading your current archive is only going to be needed
  once. And afterwards you can easily access your messages from multiple
  applications/devices.

  (Note that during the next 10 days I may not have frequent access to the internet and therefore replies may be delayed.)

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  Matt June 18th, 2011 @ 12:08 AM

  I'd just like to add my $.02 worth as another potential customer for whom local mailbox storage is important. I'm a long-time Eudora user, looking for a replacement mail client as Eudora will no longer run on Lion without Rosetta. I have lots of mail that I have moved off of my server into local Eudora mailboxes. I don't need it on my server. I don't want it on my server. I don't need access to it anyplace other than my home machine. I don't want to move it all back to the server.

  I'm not sure the lack of local mailbox storage is really a deal-breaker for me, but it's definitely a strong negative point. I haven't looked at Mailmate enough to determine whether it has enough other advantages over Apple Mail to outweigh this strong disadvantage. I haven't downloaded it to experiment with your suggested solution of a mailbox explicitly taken offline, to see whether that would be adequate for my needs.

  I just thought you should know that Jeff is not the only potential customer out there for whom this is important.

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  benny June 18th, 2011 @ 06:08 AM

  Thanks for the feedback. I know that local mailboxes is a popular
  request among some (potential) users, but it is not part of the future
  of MailMate. In addition, I have also regretted my comment about keeping
  an IMAP mailbox offline since I would prefer that the messages in
  MailMate can be considered a cache of the messages on the server, i.e.,
  one should (when fully synched) always be able to safely delete the
  entire Application Support folder.

  Thanks for considering MailMate even though it does not quite fit your
  needs.

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  macula January 3rd, 2013 @ 01:41 PM

  To generalize the use case, it would be nice to be able to select an arbitrary "Archive" destination for each account. For exampe, I would like to archive all my accounts into my iCloud account. At the moment, I understand that this is not possible in MailMate—rather, each account contains a dedicated Archive mailbox.

  Meanwhile, I perfectly understand Benny's rationale. MailMate cannot have hard-wired functionality to cater to every conceivable use case.

  All of which boils down to the following: Please, Benny, please make AppleScript support your #1 priority! :-)

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  macula January 3rd, 2013 @ 01:42 PM

  (Meanwhile, I'm suffering without OmniFocus connectivity—also easily remediable once AppleScript is supported.)

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  benny January 3rd, 2013 @ 01:54 PM

  @macula: It is possible to bind a key to move messages to an explicit IMAP mailbox. I'm not sure it can be bound to the standard archive key, but it may be possible if using System Preferences to change the Archive menu shortcut. With regard to AppleScript: It seems to take me forever, but scripting will be improved (although with as little AppleScript as possible). In the mean time “Edit ▸ Copy as Link” is the best you can do.

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  Arch Getty January 8th, 2013 @ 04:14 AM

  I work for a research university and have a lot of archive messages. The university IMAP server has a quota. So without the ability to keep local archived messages, Mailmate doesn't work for me.

  Did you ever implement the export to .mbox format option? I need to get my messages back to Apple Mail. Some of them I put into Mailmate offline files so I could search them, but now it seems that local offline files in Mailmate are more trouble than they are worth. (Moving files to them confuses both Mailmate and my server.)

  So, although I think you have a potentially great program here; I bought it and put it through the paces but now I have to get things back to Apple Mail which does allow offline local files. Can you help?

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  Arch Getty January 8th, 2013 @ 04:16 AM

  PS. When I took the local archive files online and Mailmate tried to synch/upload them, Mailmate gave me all kinds of "bad header" messages that wouldn't stop or go away even when I force quite the program and started it up again!

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  benny January 8th, 2013 @ 10:12 AM

  @Arch Getty:

  No, there is no .mbox export, but you can drag messages out of MailMate to get standard .eml files which should be importable by most other email applications. You can also find the messages in the same format within this folder: ~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Messages/.

  The 'bad header' error messages were from the server. I'm very interested in the exact wording of these since it's not a known problem (an IMAP server should very rarely reject uploaded messages). If it's a Retry request then you can hold down ⇧ when clicking Retry and then MailMate generates a log file on the desktop describing the retry attempt.

  I'm sorry MailMate did not fit your needs. Here are a few suggestions in case you want to give it a second chance:

  1. Ask the University to increase the quota. You might be surprised.
  2. Use a secondary IMAP server for archival of messages. You can easily move messages between accounts and you can even bind a key to automatically archive messages to the secondary IMAP server. If you are willing to pay for it then fastmail.fm is a good option -- no affiliation. Otherwise I think Gmail offers up to 10GB for free (but it's slower, less standards compliant, and privacy may be an issue).
  3. A technically harder solution would be to run an IMAP server on your local machine.
  4. For large collections of offline emails some users like Mail Steward (no affiliation and I haven't tried it).

  Solutions 1 and 2 would ensure that you have access to your emails on all machines/devices.

  Write to me directly by email if you would like to have a refund.

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  Arch Getty January 8th, 2013 @ 09:16 PM

  Thanks for the informative reply.

  Unfortunately, Apple Mail won't import .eml files. I made it work by converting .eml to .mbox via Thunderbird.

  Your suggestion "⇧ when clicking Retry and then MailMate generates a log file on the desktop describing the retry attempt" didn't work. No log file saved anywhere, unless you got it automatically? Anyway, I'm attaching a screen shot of the error message.

  Mail Steward looks like a fine program. But since Apple Mail can save a copy of imap messages to a local Apple Mail file, Mail Steward would appear to be useful only for MASSIVE archive purposes.

  No need for a refund. Consider it support for your efforts! But I have to say bluesky-ing a feature that so many have asked for seems strange. I get it that you want a clean imap program where everything on the local computer is cached, but this would appear to exclude business, academic, and research users who have needs for big archival storage and want it saved local. That said, fine program!

  • screen-shot-2013-01-08-at-115.jpeg 35.3 KB

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  Edi Venturin December 19th, 2013 @ 02:33 PM

  Hi Benny,
  Just came across this and, I also consider it sad news. My main use for Mailmate at the moment is for my corporate email, and I have a 2 GB / 2 years) limit on my account (corporate policy). I wanted to replace the tool officially supported by the company (Mail.app) and Mailmate seems like the perfect match… except that if I understood correctly, no way to have a local archive. Is that still the case on latest version (1.7.2 at the moment I write)?

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  benny December 20th, 2013 @ 08:50 AM

  Yes, MailMate really is IMAP only. In my opinion, the best solutions are:

  • Change corporate policy. Why support IMAP if it's not really supported...
  • Use a secondary IMAP account for long term storage.
  • Setup an IMAP server locally for long term storage.

  Note that it is possible to have an offline (dummy) IMAP account in MailMate which could serve as local storage, but there are some caveats:

  • I don't recommend it, because I really don't want any users to trust MailMate with their only copy of emails.
  • Moving a message from an online IMAP account to an offline IMAP account does not work as you might expect. MailMate won't delete it from the source IMAP account until after it has been successfully uploaded to the destination IMAP account. This never happens for a dummy account. The only workaround currently is to drag messages to, e.g., the Desktop and then drag them into the offline IMAP account (and then delete them from the original IMAP account). Make sure you understand this if going down this path.

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  Ingo Lantschner December 27th, 2013 @ 07:30 PM

  I just set up a local IMAP-Server by installing OS X Server (Maverick) for less than 20 € (bought in Apples Appstore). Installation was quite easy - it's an installation of the famous Dovecot IMAP server. I installed only the IMAP-Server from this "App" and denied incoming-access in the local firewall when prompted. After installation of the server, I added a new IMAP-account to Apple Mail and imported that into MailMate using it's Import Account ... feature. Seems to work fine.

  Existing archives in Apple Mail can be dragged and dropped onto the "OS X Server" Account now and will be available in MailMate afterwards. But it takes a while, if you have thousands of e-mails.

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  tvalleau December 29th, 2013 @ 01:11 AM

  You can archive locally with MailSteward. I'm doing it. Puts everything into a mySQL database.

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  Harvey Leff January 11th, 2014 @ 12:39 AM

  I am testing EagleFiler for local storage. I keep copies of all local files off-site (cloud storage), so if my local files are somehow lost, I'll still have them elsewhere. Although EagleFiler seems pretty good, it sometimes slows down (spinning ball) with 6,000 messages in it. I'm not sure why. Backing up is not automatic, as it can be in MailSteward, but it is no more difficult than simply dragging the files with dates later than the most recent record in EagleFiler into the EagleFiler window. Simple. I find EagleFiler much easier to use than MailSteward for searching. I'm also testing Mail Archiver X. Does anyone have experience using any of these, or possibly other, archiving programs? Thanks.

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  klktrk February 12th, 2015 @ 03:36 AM

  Here's a great write-up on how to simply store all your mail locally by running a local imap server. You don't need to install or manage a mail transfer agent (postfix etc). You just need an imap server.

  http://xdeb.org/node/1607

  dovecot is not easy to build yourself, so use brew to install like (like the linked guide says).

  A couple things I would add

  1. For some reason brew did not create the _dovenull user, so I had to use the dscl command line tool to create that user

  2. The author doesn't make it clear, but this is the configuration line that is the real kicker here:
     

     listen = 127.0.0.1
     

  By setting this, your local imap server cannot be connected to from the outside world, so you don't have to worry about someone at the café sniffing port 143 and finding all your mail.

  I wasted time setting up ssl on my local install. Don't. dovecot will not use ssl if you are connecting locally. it will just use plaintext. It assumes a local user should be trusted. So, with that in mind, if you have many user accounts on your local machine, and you don't want them in your mail archive, you may want to look into setting PAM authentication rather than the simple plain text file password authentication that's outlined here.

  In any event, it might seem like a hassle, but it really takes about 30 minutes or so if you follow the guide linked to above. And now I have access to 10,000+ emails stored locally on my laptop, all available in MailMate via my "local archive" imap account.

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  benny February 12th, 2015 @ 10:23 AM

  @klktrk: Thanks for the details. I just want to note that this means that each email is stored twice on your machine. One copy in MailMate and one copy in Dovecot. That is basically the only real downside of this setup (and another argument that MailMate would benefit from an online mode in which local copies of all emails are not stored).

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  Joanna Bryson June 26th, 2015 @ 10:37 AM

  I just want to confirm that in this age of concern about privacy & security (which is one of the appeals of malemate, that it passes the security checks) it would be very, very good if we could keep archives on our disk and not put them in our gmail account.

  I have mbox format archives going back to the 1980s, but my university just forced my department onto the main email accounts, and then switched to exchange without IMAP support turned on (they refuse to turn it on). So I now have lots of proprietary files I have never let google parse, and I'd rather keep it that way. Malemate is the only client I've found that is sensible about keyboard commands and labelling. I would prefer if it wasn't mandating that I move my email archives to a service it doesn't like (gmail) or pay for yet another email service.

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  benny June 26th, 2015 @ 11:25 AM

  @Joanna: If I understand you correctly then you cannot use MailMate since it doesn't work with Exchange (without IMAP). So you are looking to use MailMate to handle an offline archive of emails? In that case you can just create an offline dummy IMAP account (with a bogus IMAP server address) and import your emails into that.

  (With respect to privacy then I don't think the best solution would be to have emails locally only. I would rather introduce an option to encrypt emails before uploading them to the server. Still, you always have to trust the email provider when sending/receiving emails -- unless you always encrypt emails and in that case an encrypt-on-server feature would almost be redundant.)

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  Joanna Bryson June 27th, 2015 @ 08:46 AM

  Hi, thanks, I will try to figure out how to make an "offline dummy IMAP account". I've given up finding a usable OSX Exchange client and am just forwarding all of my university's email to gmail, again something they & I wanted to avoid, but I may also set up another IMAP account to take the forwarded mail, but if I can set up a dummy account locally that would make the whole process simpler.

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  Jerry August 16th, 2016 @ 07:30 PM

  Thx Benny...

  At first I wanted a simple offline IMAP function in MailMate. It would have been the quickest solution to my current problem; (Online IMAP account is nearly full, Do you want to upgrade?)...

  But after searching, not finding, thinking, and reading this thread, I realized that Benny is right. I do not want/need an offline/archive function in MailMate. What I should want is an archive IMAP mail account.

  What we really want is a free, unlimited, secure, IMAP account to use as Archive

  This does not exists. So a compromise is required. The best compromise will different for each use case. But in None of the compromise solutions is making MailMate in to a recoverable secure Mail Store a good answer.

  I will be setting up an local only DoveCot IMAP server on my MAC (as mentioned above). This will solve my immediate problem. And I will continue to think about how best to implement IMAP Archive for my case.

  Jerry

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  Kevin Killion October 16th, 2016 @ 09:32 PM

  I'm another heartbroken Eudora user.

  I downloaded MailMate and gave it a try and loved it!

  BUT ... not having plain local folders stored on my machine is a real deal breaker for me too. I have many thousands of old emails in "mailboxes" (local folders) on Eudora. They are backed up just like any other documents. There is no reason at all for them to be stored on some remote server, nor do I need to access them from any computer, which is a nice feature for current mail but unneeded for these thousands of old messages.

  The solutions offered, involving setting up IMAP servers, complex installations, MySQL database are all yucky solutions ... they restore the complexity and fragility we want to get away from.

  You know, Eudora stil runs fine on Windows. I'm seriously considering migrating to Windows just to stay with that one beautiful mail program.

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  T Bob October 21st, 2016 @ 03:11 AM

  Yeah, I wanted to voice my opinion as well, coming from Thunderbird. LOVE MailMate! Thanks for the great software!

  Local Mailboxes additionally help to keep all your mail in one place (and make it all searchable) without having to do an additional (potentially complicated) IMAP Server install. If Mailmate stored them locally properly, then whatever backup system you have in place would naturally create redundancy.

  I wish there were another option, but for now it sounds like DoveCot + MailMate is the best solution. Bummer...

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  benny October 24th, 2016 @ 08:37 AM

  This ticket regular gets new comments and I do understand that some users would like to have a local archive just like they did in their previous email client, but it's still not a feature planned for the future of MailMate.

  There's a workaround I think I haven't mentioned in this ticket. It is possible to drag emails out of MailMate to create standard raw email files (also the internal format in MailMate) with the .eml extension. These emails are still searchable using “Spotlight” and MailMate can be used to open them (to allow replying, forwarding, etc.). This might be sufficient for some users.

  (There's currently an issue with dragging emails out of MailMate on Sierra. Hold down ⌥ when clicking “Check Now” in the Software Update preferences pane to get the latest test version which includes a fix for this.)

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  Chris September 2nd, 2017 @ 06:45 PM

  Let's keep the tradition of bringing this nasty topic up alive. ;-)

  As has been discussed before, there are plenty of good reasons for archiving e-mails locally and workarounds such as setting up a local IMAP server (i.e., Dovecot with MacPorts) are error-prone, potential security hazards and impossible to set up and maintain for many users.

  Archiving years of e-mails on a publicly accessible IMAP server is first and foremost a security and data privacy issue.

  If someone breaks into your e-mail provider's server and releases the obtained data to the public, your encrypted (?) e-mails are out in the open. In such an unfortunate case, I believe it makes a huge difference whether e-mails from the last 1 to 6 months or any e-mail you have ever written in the last 15 years gets exposed to the public.

  With increasing computing power, today's encryption will be ineffective at some point in time. Apart from that, someone may find a critical flaw in currently popular encryption algorithms. The question is not if but when the encrypted files you share with the public today will become readable to anyone. It is therefor good practise to move any sensitive data which does not have to be online to a private realm, e.g., a local e-mail archive.

  Even if you keep all your e-mails on an IMAP server, having a local backup in case your provider messes something up seems like a good idea.

  Before shifting to MacOS mainly, I used Eudora and later Claws-Mail for e-mail. In Claws-Mail I used rules to automatically move live e-mails from the IMAP server to an offline mailbox serving as archive once the e-mails reached a certain age. The archive (MH format) was included in regular file backups. Despite working with a huge set of subfolders both on the IMAP server and in the archive, I rarely had to move e-mails manually and I cannot stress enough what a blessing that was. Neither did I need to switch programs for archiving e-mails nor did I have to think about the archiving process in daily life. Yet, I had the option to easily override things manually within the e-mail client at any time.

  Using extra tools to archive e-mails in non-human-readable databases, setting up a local IMAP-server, or regularly exporting folders manually (what a tedious task) in my opinion is a far inferior solution compared to automatically archiving e-mails within the e-mail application. I therefore strongly support the request for a local archive feature.

  Having noticed that this has also been discussed a lot on the mailing list (e.g., https://lists.freron.com/mailmate/2015-August/004813.html), I would like to emphasise that this is not about POP3. I am all for IMAP but still think that archiving older e-mails is best done locally, preferably in a simple human readable format.

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  benny September 4th, 2017 @ 11:34 AM

  @Chris: I'll keep your thoughts in mind. The feature is still “bluesky”, but I've noted some thoughts on allowing MailMate to easily view disk folders with standard .eml files. I would find that useful myself and essentially this would be an implementation of local storage. But I make absolutely no promises on this. Don't expect it to be implemented.

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  Chris September 6th, 2017 @ 03:11 PM

  @benny: Thanks for taking the time to respond. I do keep in mind that this may not be implemented and keep looking for other other ways to deal with this, too.

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  Jeff Y. May 15th, 2018 @ 05:53 AM

  Hi Benny,

  I think MailMate stores messages and their attachments in the nice Maildir format. To archive a mailbox, would it be okay to just copy the mailbox from within Application\ Support/MailMate to somewhere else, and then delete it from the IMAP account?

  You mentioned it's possible to archive messages by selecting them and dragging them to the desktop. What do you think about being able to do that (recursively) for entire IMAP folders?

  Thanks!

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  benny May 15th, 2018 @ 10:53 AM

  @Jeff: It's not Maildir, but the emails are in a standard email format which means you can copy them if you like. You cannot remove them from the MailMate folder since that'll confuse MailMate. You have to use MailMate itself to delete the emails.

  Exporting is probably best done using the “Command ▸ Export” menu. This can also save emails in the IMAP folder hierarchy.

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  perizoqui June 30th, 2018 @ 09:26 PM

  @klktrk: How did you check to see if _dovenull user had been created by brew? And how did you use dscl to fix it? Am trying to follow the same guide, but can't seem to get Apple Mail or MailMate to talk to the account. Feel like I'm missing a step somewhere...

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  perizoqui July 1st, 2018 @ 03:57 AM

  Nevermind, figures it out. There was an error in my local.conf file. Apologies all.

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  felixS October 21st, 2019 @ 09:00 AM

  Hello Benny, sorry to open this thread (... or wound :-) ?) again.

  As an old Eudora fan, too, with a complex evolving folder structure from Eudora time, private and professional (adademic), I am VERY VERY happy, after some years on Apple Mail, to have found MailMate (I would only like to move to Linux now but your app is one of the things holding me back!!). It's extremely efficient.

  There is, however, another important point regarding "unlimited IMAP storage". Beyond convenience/specific user needs and data security, being able to clear email off the IMAP server would be fundamental for many for ecological reasons. (Many of us, especially young parents like I am, are painfully aware that our footprint is exploding, with the expected consequences that are beyond the subject of this thread. And most people with a propensity to read this kind of thread to the end are certainly even more aware than I am of the energy resources needed for running servers etc.)

  I do therefore also see a usefulness of local storage for archiving purposes and removal of email from the IMAP server. Most of us will agree that it's just not possible to keep up manually and export/remove emails progressively.

  My ideal solution would be a tool capable of "incremental moves" from the IMAP folder to an (ideally "mirrored") identical folder structure once the message is older than ... XYZ.
  (In my case, I would do that on my work computer for my academic accounts where sometimes I have to go back a year or two, sometimes more, but it's uncommon and I don't need GBs of messages hanging around on the server for those few instances).

  I would imagine this to be complex to implement within MailMate itself, but I am not an IT specialist and don't "code"... It would be great to see, though.

  Until then, for myself, and maybe other users stumbling over this thread like I did, a backup utility could be the solution, and I am looking into apps that conserve folder structure and keep "backed-up" (... archived) emails accessible (within that folder structure and searchable).
  Again, in my case, I would archive to local storage on my work computer with its TimeMachine backup and synced to an external "archive" hard disk (personally, using ChronoSync) and then erase all emails older than XYZ on the IMAP server.

  I hope this comment is of some use...

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  Robert Brenstein October 31st, 2019 @ 12:44 AM

  Let me add another view to this. Not that long ago, I was assisting another user who moved from Apple mail to MM and was suddenly missing a bunch of important emails. We have eventually found all those emails left behind in the old mail client, archived in a local mailbox. Before MM, I was a long time Eudora user, almost from its beginning until I could not holder stick with Snow Leopard. When search for a new client, I discovered that local mail storage is handled quite differently by different programs and that does not always mesh well with the concepts of IMAP.

  The bottom line is that I second Benny's motion to keep MailMate as pure IMAP client. People who need local storage or offline archiving can use EagleFiler or Mail Archiver X for that purpose. I personally imported m 15 years of Eudora mails into Mail Archiver, retaining their exact structure and started anew with MailMate, evolving a new structure optimized for IMAP and taking full advantage of MM's wonderful smart mailboxes.

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  dah May 27th, 2020 @ 09:03 PM

  I've been following this thread for years, occasionally checking if MailMate would support local mailboxes. I finally kind of accepted it wasn't going to happen, so I just bit the bullet and got a license and decided to figure out a way to make it work.

  What I ended up doing is installing the IMAP server Dovecot with home brew by following the instructions here:

  https://xdeb.org/post/2014/03/07/running-dovecot-as-a-local-only-im...

  I then added the local account to mail.app and copied everything over. Then I added the account to MailMate and all the emails were there. I also set the path for dovecot to be inside ~/Documents/Dovecot so they benefit from iCloud backups. I wish I did this long ago now, I'm really enjoying MailMate.

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  Michael K. September 29th, 2020 @ 01:13 PM

  I think it's way easier to setup a local archive. At least a manual archive.

  Configure a non existing imap account in mailmate. It shows up as (disconnected) forever of course ;-).
  Now you are able to create subfolders and import/copy or move mails into it.
  Done. ;-)

  PS: I am trying MailMate as a replacement for Apple Mail right now and this "problem" actually brought me to this thread.

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  benny September 30th, 2020 @ 01:38 PM

  @Michael: It's easy to use a dummy offline account, BUT it won't behave intuitively. You can use it to import emails to have an offline archive, but if you move something from an online account to an offline account then the move will never be completed. The result is that the email will exist in both places (but only visible in the offline account in MailMate). MailMate is waiting for the offline account to go online such that it can ensure that it has been uploaded before it is deleted from its original account.

  A workaround is to make a copy instead when moving it (hold down the option key). And then explicitly delete the email in the source account.

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  Michael K. September 30th, 2020 @ 08:37 PM

  Yeah, good point. Not very intuitive and easy to screw up. Perhaps the local IMAP server would be the best solution after all.