[MlMt] can i do this...

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

Hi Barry,

first of all, thanks for trying out MailMate. Also thanks for using the 
mailing list. Even though MailMate handles mailing lists quite well, 
this mailing list has had very little traffic. Therefore, it may also be 
received by people who have not checked out MailMate in a long time (but 
joined the mailing list at some point). So, before answering your 
question, I just want to state that MailMate is at version 1.0.2 now. 
For any recipients on this mailing list who want to catch up, the 
following links may be useful:

	http://freron.com/
	http://blog.freron.com/2011/mailmate-1-0-released/
	http://tracker.mailmate-app.com/
	http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/34543/mailmate

Currently, the mailing list has 47 members.

Ok, now back to your message.

On 11 Mar 2011, at 22:42, Barry Chern wrote:

> Is there any way or ways I can use this and still keep all the 
> messages I want on my hard drive forever without having them kept on 
> the server (for more than a short period of time).

A prelude to my answer: I get (variations of) this question quite 
frequently and I must admit I am still a bit surprised. Using IMAP only 
for temporary storage reduces IMAP to a complicated variant of POP3. 
MailMate does not support POP3 by design, that is, I believe IMAP should 
replace POP3 for most people. As I have stated elsewhere, if MailMate 
was to support POP3, it would most likely be in a way such that the 
retrieved messages were put directly into an IMAP mailbox.

So, my preferred answer would be: I really think you should consider to 
use IMAP as it was intended, if possible.

My practical answers are:

1. The best way to keep messages “locally” only, is to run your own 
IMAP server either on your own machine or your local network and move 
the messages to an account on this server. The disadvantage is that each 
message will be located both on the server and within MailMate, but you 
could also think of that as a backup system.

2. Second-best is kind of a hack. If importing messages into MailMate, 
you can first create a mailbox on some IMAP account and then take that 
mailbox offline before importing messages into it. Then MailMate will 
not try to upload the messages to the server. Note that you cannot just 
move messages from an online mailbox to an offline mailbox and then 
expect the messages to be removed from the server. MailMate does not 
delete messages on the server before it is sure that the messages have 
reached the destination. You can however delete the messages server-side 
after moving them.

I also have a selfish reason for wanting my users to use IMAP as it is 
intended (or at least by using solution 1 above). If MailMate should 
contain some bug that corrupts its internal database then it is much 
easier for me to tell a user to start over by deleting everything and 
then synchronize the accounts than it is to ask the user to locate any 
local messages and re-import them into MailMate (which would also lose 
any keywords applied to the messages). That said, MailMate does save all 
messages in a simple disk folder hierarchy in standard raw message 
format (.eml).

Again, thanks for trying out MailMate. I'm sorry I couldn't give you a 
more simple answer.

And to everybody on the list: You are welcome to ask any questions you 
like. Bugs and feature requests which do not seem relevant for many 
users are probably better handled via the tracker 
(http://tracker.mailmate-app.com).

-- 
Benny