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<p dir="auto">Hello list,</p>
<p dir="auto">As I’ve mentioned in a previous email, I am moving from Apple Mail to MailMate. One aspect of my Mail setup that I’ve not been able to replicate is how I deal with messages I file when not on my computer.</p>
<h2 style="font-size:1.2em">Background</h2>
<p dir="auto">I file my messages into various mailboxes using a structure that has worked for me over many years. The full mailbox hierarchy with all of these messages lives on my computer, via a local IMAP server which I’ve added to MailMate as an account named <code>On My Mac</code>.^1 On my mail hosts, I have a mailbox hierarchy which mirrors a subset of the full mailbox hierarchy that is on my Mac. This allows me to file messages from my phone or if I ever have to login on another computer via webmail.</p>
<p dir="auto">So, for instance, I might have the following mailbox hierarchies:</p>
<p dir="auto"><strong>On My Mac</strong></p>
<pre style="border:thin solid gray; margin-left:15px; margin-right:15px; max-width:90vw; overflow-x:auto; padding:5px"><code>1 Correspondence
└Alice
└Mary
└Miscellaneous
└Tod
2 Admin
└Banking
└Repairs
Deleted Messages
</code></pre>
<p dir="auto"><strong>Mail Account 1 (<code>email_1@example.com</code>)</strong></p>
<pre style="border:thin solid gray; margin-left:15px; margin-right:15px; max-width:90vw; overflow-x:auto; padding:5px"><code>Inbox
Sent
To File
└1 Correspondence
└Alice
└Miscellaneous
└Tod
</code></pre>
<p dir="auto"><strong>Mail Account 2 (<code>email_2@example.com</code>)</strong></p>
<pre style="border:thin solid gray; margin-left:15px; margin-right:15px; max-width:90vw; overflow-x:auto; padding:5px"><code>Inbox
Sent
To File
└1 Correspondence
└Miscellaneous
└2 Admin
└Banking
</code></pre>
<p dir="auto">The mailboxes in <code>Mail Account 1</code> & <code>Mail Account 2</code> are available to me wherever I access my email, but the mailboxes in <code>On My Mac</code> are only available when I’m on my Mac. So I file messages when I’m on my phone, but when I get back to my Mac, I need to (eventually) copy all the messages from <code>Mail Account 1</code> & <code>Mail Account 2</code> to their corresponding mailboxes in <code>On My Mac</code>.</p>
<h2 style="font-size:1.2em">Solutions I’ve Investigated</h2>
<p dir="auto">(1) I have written an AppleScript that does this message filing in Apple Mail. It simply steps through the mailbox hierarchy on the mail servers, starting from a specified root folder, and moves all the messages in each mailbox to the corresponding mailbox in <code>On My Mac</code>. I’ve had look at MailMate’s AppleScript dictionary, and I think it’s too rudimentary to do this.</p>
<p dir="auto">(2) My next thought was that I could set up Rules on the mail server mailboxes that would move their contents to the appropriate mailbox in the <code>On My Mac</code> account. This would require manually customising the rules for each mailbox (as opposed to my AppleScript which traverses the mail servers’ hierarchies automatically), but at least I can do the setup once and then the message filing happens automatically.</p>
<p dir="auto">However, my Mac is not always on when I’m using email on my phone, so I can’t rely on MailMate being open at the point at which messages ‘arrive’ in the filing mailboxes on the mail host. I thought I could get around this by selected all the filing mailboxes on the mail host and choosing <code>Apply Rules</code>, but it seems that <code>Apply Rules</code> is only available if you have a single mailbox selected. Note, this wouldn’t have been ideal anyway, as it requires several steps to select the mailboxes across at least three mail hosts and then trigger the rules. Ideally I want to be able to select one menu item or press one key combination and have the filing triggered.</p>
<p dir="auto">So I’m out of ideas. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can achieve my filing? The task is essentially to automatically move emails from the mailboxes underneath a specified root on one or more IMAP servers to the correspondingly-named mailboxes on another IMAP server.</p>
<p dir="auto">Any help with this would be <strong>hugely</strong> appreciated, as it’s the only part of my workflow that is really problematic after moving from Mail, and the only one where MailMate doesn’t seem to have an alternative way of tackling the problem.</p>
<p dir="auto">Many thanks,<br>
Jolin</p>
<p dir="auto">^1 <em>As a side note, I am aware that this is not the MailMate philosophy and the recommended procedure is to store all archive messages on my email host(s). For a few reasons I’m not interested in this and won’t do it. I’ve read the whole ‘<a href="https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/81-archiving-to-local-folders">Archiving to local folders</a>’ thread on the issue tracker and ended up using the link to <a href="https://xdeb.org/post/2014/03/07/running-dovecot-as-a-local-only-imap-server-on-os-x/">instructions on running a local Dovecot IMAP server</a>.</em></p>
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