[MlMt] mailmate Digest, Vol 20, Issue 3

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 14 Nov 2012, at 14:13, Tom Gillett wrote:

> thank you for incredibly fast response.  i am studying mail steward 
> and then will pick best route forward.  on another front, o you know 
> it mailtags is compatible with mail mate?

If you mean the Apple Mail plugin from Indev Software then no. It would 
be impossible (extremely difficult) to support Apple Mail plugins. They 
are barely supported by Apple themselves.

If you just mean if MailMate is compatible with the tagging done by 
MailTags then the answer is a bit muddy. MailMate provides access for 
all headers of an email and MailTags inserts tags in the headers of 
messages. In other words the tags are readable and it is probably 
possible to create mailboxes showing messages with specific tags (I 
haven't looked into the exact MailTags format).

The obvious question is then: Will MailMate ever support writing 
MailTags tags? The answer is no and the reason is a little bit 
technical, but it boils down to the fact that changing the headers of an 
IMAP located message is extremely inefficient.

This does not mean that MailMate is not going to support tagging. It is 
already possible to setup custom key bindings to toggle so-called IMAP 
keywords. This requires support from the IMAP server, but most servers 
do support at least a certain number of such keywords (MS Exchange is a 
notable exception, but it does not support much at all).

Custom key bindings are an expert feature, but the next update of 
MailMate is going to include a graphical user interface for tagging. If 
you (or anyone else) want to try my first-shot implementation then a 
test version of MailMate is available. It can be fetched holding down 
⌥ when clicking “Check Now” in the Software Update preferences 
pane. I believe the current test version is stable (obviously that is 
not always the case).

To sum it up, MailMate does (or will) support tagging, but it's not 
compatible with MailTags.

-- 
Benny