[MlMt] moving Mailmate mail to a newtork share

Raza Rizvi raz at raz.org
Tue Nov 7 10:43:57 EST 2023


Christian,

Apologies for delayed reply, I was overseas.

I asked the same question back in Feb 2021 and summarised to the list 
the following which might help you:

**
So I had useful suggestions from some readers and it was Bill who was 
spot on.

So the “Messages” alias IS ACTUALLY a symlink to Messages.noindex so 
if you want to move the Messages.noindex folder elsewhere (while 
MailMate is not running), you need to recreate that symlink. Creating an 
OSX style GUI alias won’t work - and MailMate crashes shortly after 
startup when it tries to access the mail store.

Here is the difference between the “Messages” apparent alias (which 
I had named Messages ORIG” and an OSX GUI created alias:

OSX $ ls -al Me*
lrwx------ 1 raza staff 16 24 Feb 19:47 Messages ORIG -> 
Messages.noindex
-rw-r--r--@ 1 raza staff 944 25 Feb 09:37 Messages.noindex alias

so the top link shows the “l” for symlink

So from within the original MailMate directory I created a new symlink 
to the copied mail store, and renamed the original Messages.noindex:

OSX $ ln -sf '/Volumes/SSD20201/MailMate/Messages.noindex' Messages

OSX $ ls -al
total 112
…
lrwxr-xr-x 1 raza staff 43 25 Feb 09:45 Messages -> 
/Volumes/SSD20201/MailMate/Messages.noindex
lrwx------ 1 raza staff 16 24 Feb 19:47 Messages ORIG -> 
Messages.noindex
drwxrwxrwx 4 raza staff 128 16 Nov 14:03 Messages.noindex ORIG

Then I started up MailMate.

And sent this message. So it does all work.

**

This was for moving the whole of the message store because like you, I 
was running out of disk space. Though I chose to do it to a locally 
attached SSD rather than a NAS.

Raza

On 7 Nov 2023, at 14:49, Christian Bailey via mailmate wrote:

>> ln -hfs afp://[NAS]/data/MailMate/Messages ~/Library/Application
> Support/MailMate/Messages
> I tried it again from scratch and this time it worked. I think there 
> may
> have been a problem with how I changed the symlink the first time.
>
> I also see that now Options-General-Messages Folder-Custom location 
> has
> updated to reflect the symlink. This is unexpected. Normally a user 
> would
> expect to be able to change the symlink by changing that setting.
>
> My message store had file mix-ups in this whole process so I'm 
> starting
> with a new one. I know I can use the “Message ▸ Reset...” menu 
> item after
> selecting all emails in each folder. Is there a way to do this for a 
> whole
> Account without deleting and re-adding it?
>
> On Tue, Nov 7, 2023 at 6:22 AM Christian Bailey via mailmate 
> 'mailmate at
> lists.freron.com' <freron+mailmate=lists.freron.com at aetm.us> wrote:
>
>> I tried moving the target directory (com.freron.MailMate) to the NAS 
>> and
>> changing the link, but now MailMate crashes when run. I tried moving 
>> the
>> target directory to a USB drive and changed the link to point to 
>> that.
>> MailMate crashes when run.
>>
>> I got MailMate to run again by deleting the symbolic link, but all 
>> but
>> newly received messages have their content missing. I could refetch
>> messages using the “Message ▸ Reset...” menu item, but want to 
>> move the
>> directory where they are stored first.
>>
>> I've tried multiple times changing the folder in 
>> Options-General-Messages
>> Folder-Custom location. However, that always reverts after restarting
>> MailMate.
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 6, 2023 at 2:02 PM Christian Bailey via mailmate 
>> 'mailmate at
>> lists.freron.com' <freron+mailmate=lists.freron.com at aetm.us> wrote:
>>
>>> On a MacMini, the SSD is full, mostly due to mailmate mailboxes.
>>>
>>> I tried moving them by changing the folder in 
>>> Options-General-Messages
>>> Folder-Custom location. However, no files were moved.
>>>
>>> I see the mail is actually kept in: ~/com.freron.MailMate/Messages
>>> With a symlink from: ~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Messages
>>>
>>> Can I just move the first folder to the NAS and then change the 
>>> symlink
>>> with:
>>> ln -hfs afp://[NAS]/data/MailMate/Messages ~/Library/Application
>>> Support/MailMate/Messages
>>>
>>> ?
>>>
>>> I thought this would be a common issue and searched first, but 
>>> didn’t
>>> find anything.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> mailmate mailing list
>>> mailmate at lists.freron.com
>>> https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
>>>
>>>
>>>

> _______________________________________________
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> mailmate at lists.freron.com
> https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
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