open link in viewer window

thanks heaps Benny. I wasn't aware of the very helpful ⌥⌘S shortcut, which I've briefly tested. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work if the message is in the Archive.

Are you sure about the “Archive”. I cannot see how this feature would depend on the mailbox folder. Maybe something else triggers it to fail?

You are, of course, right, and my apologies for sending through a half-baked response. After a little more testing, it seems that it is not the mailbox folder that causes the shortcut to fail. Instead, the ⌥⌘S shortcut fails when used on a message opened from a link created using the "Copy as Link" action. The ⌥⌘S shortcut works as intended on messages opened by double-clicking. Does that explanation make more sense?

Yes, but I still cannot reproduce it. I took the latest arriving email, used Copy as Link, and then did like this in a Terminal window:

open "message://%3cb64271f2eb26aa9d8e750ccae2e85db6ab1387a1_5@freron.lighthouseapp%3e"

Then I hit ⌥⌘S and it worked fine. Could you explore a bit more and see if there is some other pattern/trigger?

To confirm, my running

open message://%3cb64271f2eb26aa9d8e750ccae2e85db6ab1387a1_6@freron.lighthouseapp%3e

yields a new window for which ⌥⌘S doesn't work. Double-clicking on the same message gives a new window for which ⌥⌘S does work.

Sorry to not be able to give more informative news!

I'll have to look at the code for finding potential problems. You could try launching from a Terminal window and then see if any errors are output when the shortcut fails. Just paste this line in a Terminal window and then trigger the issue:

/Applications/MailMate.app/Contents/MacOS/MailMate

Good news! Launching from a terminal window solved the problem: I can now use the shortcut on any window, opened from link or otherwise. Indeed, relaunching mailmate via other means also seems to fix the problem for those other instances. I apologise for wasting your time, but hope it was useful for some other purpose.

A brief update: The problem has recurred, but I'm still no closer to working out the cause. This time, restarting mailmate has not fixed the problem. Any experiments that you suggest that I could run would be appreciated.

In detail, the problem is that, for some messages, many of the options in the "Message" menu are unavailable (greyed-out). This includes send, edit as new message, move to mailbox, attach files, go to source, show in finder and go to mailbox. No error message is produced in the Terminal window; the command is just unavailable.

I still haven't figured out the pattern between which messages suffer from the problem. It's certainly not all messages opened from links, but it is most of them. I'm sorry this is so vague: I'm struggling to think of hypotheses.

Thanks again!

This behavior means that MailMate does not think it knows the message. In other words, it handles it as a temporary message which is not located in any IMAP mailboxes. This explains all the greyed-out stuff.

I assume we are still dealing with the message: URL scheme and the open command.

Could you share one of the Message-IDs. Maybe MailMate does not handle it correctly (the format of the Message-ID could be the trigger). Preferably the raw Message-ID line in the message (⌥⌘U).

Here's an emblematic example: open message://%3cCAEnnZbMddhOhzGZpZ3UZTsFQCH+AgwuJg3+5kbjoowcuUcV78g@mail.gmail.com%3e opens a window that contains two identical copies of the same message. They both have an idential Message-ID: Message-ID: <CAEnnZbMddhOhzGZpZ3UZTsFQCH+AgwuJg3+5kbjoowcuUcV78g@mail.gmail.com>.

I hadn't noticed the fact that two copies of the same message are opened previously: is that a possible cause of the problems? Thanks!

satisying my own curiosity, open message://CAEnnZbMddhOhzGZpZ3UZTsFQCH+AgwuJg3+5kbjoowcuUcV78g@mail.gmail.com produces exactly the same result as above.

I couldn't reproduce it with multiple messages either.

Just to make sure, it still works for some messages while it doesn't work for others? If yes, do you see any pattern between those that do and those that don't.

A wild guess might be that it could be related to some messages being embedded in other messages. In fact, that matches your observations quite well. Do you forward many messages as attachments?

I tried the forwarding theory, but that did not reproduce the problem.

So, any other pattern?

Another possible clue: the following warning in the Terminal is produced for problematic messages:

Warning: UID 47933 already exists in the destination mailbox ([Gmail]/Archive) as message 391709

Thanks. This error message is not related. It's just a side-effect of the weird IMAP variant used by Google.