[MlMt] Test version available: Support for tags using IMAP keywords

[Michael Tsai]

On Dec 14, 2012, at 4:26 AM, Benny Kjær Nielsen <mailinglist at freron.com> wrote:

> On 14 Dec 2012, at 9:43, Thomas Eckhold wrote:
> 
>>> I believe this would be possible if MailMate supported OpenMeta (which is supported by EagleFiler). Unfortunately I'm not so sure about the future of OpenMeta (because of the sandboxing rules of the Mac App Store). But I haven't read up on the details yet — I don't even know how much work OpenMeta support would require.
>> 
>> Maybe it could be done the other way around and Michael could implement in EagleFiler the function to read IMAP keywords. I guess they are stored "inside" the messages. Would that be possible at all?
> 
> No, IMAP keywords are stored on the IMAP server as meta data. OpenMeta would allow MailMate to also save them as metadata of files on disk. Currently MailMate keeps them in a database index file only (which should not be read by EagleFiler).
> 
> It would be possible though to add a header with tags to messages when exporting them from MailMate and that might be searchable in EagleFiler. This is a game of pros and cons, but one solution does not exclude the other.

Hi Benny,

I would suggest that MailMate write the tags into the file's xattrs in its normal mail store and also when exporting. You can see how OpenMeta does this--essentially just a binary plist. This would allow compatibility with EagleFiler and other OpenMeta applications. You don't have to use the actual OpenMeta code, which additionally writes the tags into backup files in ~/Library; this causes various problems, including with the Mac App Store.

Putting the tags in a header seems problematic to me because then the file could potentially have two sets of tags (in band and xattrs) that conflict.

--Michael