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

[Bill Cole]

On 3 Nov 2013, at 4:37, Seebs wrote:

> On 3 Nov 2013, at 3:29, Alasdair Muckart wrote:
>
>> If you want fetch-and-store rather than server-stored you want 
>> something like POP rather than IMAP. Fetchmail to a local store you 
>> access using IMAP and MailMate would act the way you sound like you 
>> need and could be backed up locally.
>
> That's basically what I've been doing, only I was keeping the "local 
> store" on a server in my house.
>
>> Do you use time machine at all? If you do, then you should have 
>> backups of your MailMate cached messages in your local backups even 
>> if you don't have them on the server backups.
>
> Conveniently, I do. In fact, this machine is backed up fairly 
> regularly to three different drives. Except, of course, that because I 
> was running around like a headless chicken without my email stuff, it 
> turned out that one of the drives had gotten unplugged from the hub 
> (this machine is a laptop, so it moves around a bunch) a couple of 
> days ago. But luck was with me, and I have backups of the cache of 
> that server's messages that are newer than the last time the server 
> was actually up.
>
> ... MailMate is now importing them into the new server's IMAP folders, 
> which is looking like it will take 3-4 more hours.


One approach (with limitations) to avoid this is to give MM a de facto 
local message store masquerading as an offline account. I did this for 
my historical archives, which imported via a tool that converted over a 
dozen years of Eudora mail into a Maildir tree that it served out via a 
rudimentary IMAP server. Once MM had imported the 250k messages in that 
tree, I offlined the account and shut down the miniserver. MM never 
complains and it has no trouble reading the mail in that account, 
despite about a year of not talking to the server it came from. I have 
also played around a little with a completely bogus "account" which I 
created using non-functional server info. I can create folders in it and 
move (or copy) messages into them, which get stored in a subdirectory of 
~Library/Application Support/MailMate/Messages/IMAP/ just like those for 
any other account.

One flaw in this approach which should be known if you use IMAP flags 
extensively is that if you ever have to rebuild your MM database from 
messages, you lose any flags that have been set on the messages in a 
fake account.