[MlMt] Uh-oh. Imap just bit me...

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 3 Nov 2013, at 7:59, mailmate-list at seebs.net wrote:

> A mail server went kerplooie.

Sorry to hear that.

> And the next time I connected to the new server... Mailmate deleted 
> all the messages which had previously been considered to be associated 
> with that account, because they were no longer present on the server.
>
> Er. That is exactly the opposite of what I wanted. Totally. In every 
> way.

I understand that, but as you write yourself then this is how IMAP is 
supposed to work.

> Is there a way to configure Mailmate to obtain mail from a server, but 
> not to ever delete mail based on changes in the server?

No, and it would be tricky to make something that would make sense to 
the user unless only 1 client would ever be connected to the server. For 
example, moving a message from one mailbox to another is implemented as 
copy+delete. If another email client is used to move a message then 
MailMate is going to see it as a deleted message in one mailbox and a 
new message in another mailbox.

Maybe warnings about unusual situations would be better. I'll get back 
to that in a reply to your other message.

> Also, is there any chance that there's a way I can retrieve the 
> several thousand messages Mailmate just deleted? I have some limited 
> backups of the server, but they are somewhat out of date, and I got a 
> lot of mail in the last week or so that I was, frankly, sort of hoping 
> not to have disappear forever.

Messages to be deleted are put in a queue. If you have quit MailMate 
then you may be able to locate the deleted messages on disk:

	~/Library/Application Support/MailMate/Messages/...

Messages are numbered sequentially which means the most recently fetched 
messages are those with the highest numbers. I'm not sure, but I think 
maybe the deletion queue starts with the oldest messages.

> I think I've run into this before, with the notion that IMAP's goal is 
> synchronization. But I don't want synchronization; I want to download 
> mail and then keep it forever. I absolutely, positively, under NO 
> CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER, want Mailmate to conclude that because a 
> file is missing on a server, obviously I don't want it anymore!

The original purpose of IMAP was to not store anything (or very little) 
locally essentially requiring the email client to always be online. 
MailMate is fully offline keeping a copy of all messages and this does 
make a disappearing mailbox (or changed identity) a more serious 
situation than it would be with an online client.

(I'll need to have some breakfast before answering your other message, 
but I'll get to it.)

-- 
Benny
http://freron.com/crowdfund2014
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