[MlMt] Using Gmail

[Gary Hull]

If you have a lot of legacy e-mail in a Gmail account, then I certainly 
understand that MailMate support for Gmail labels would be helpful. But 
it sounds like you recently moved to Gmail. In that case, make sure that 
you take a close look at MailMate's smart mailboxes, at at tags.

For instance, I used labels on Gmail for messages related to a 
particular business line. But in MailMate I'm able to cover that with an 
(admittedly super complex) smart mailbox that doesn't take any 
maintenance on my part. (The mailbox picks up on e-mail domains, names, 
keywords in the mail body, etc.) (In a worst case scenario, if a few 
things fall through the cracks, you can pick them up in the smart 
mailbox by adding an ANY ... tag = [___] in there at the end of the 
conditions and manually apply tags.

Tags are pretty much labels, but they don't map back and forth to Gmail. 
After getting things set up, however, you really never need to log into 
the Gmail web interface. It's a nice web app, but in theory you've made 
the decision to go with a Mac-side client, perhaps because you have a 
bunch of different accounts to track. So in that case, who cares if the 
Gmail app doesn't show the tags as labels if you're not using the web 
app?

(A question I just thought of: Are MailMate tags transferred up to IMAP 
servers and then down again to, for instance, another MailMate 
installation on another Macintosh? To non-MailMate IMAP clients?)

On 16 May 2014, at 18:38, Alasdair Muckart wrote:

> Thanks Gary,
>
> I completely understand the design decisions behind MailMate, and 
> Google's strange not-quite-IMAP implementation. The reality though is 
> that Gmail (and GIMAP) actually work *really* well, and recent 
> comments made me wonder if there was more label-compatibility coming 
> in MM. 
>
> On 16 May 2014 at 8:13:44 pm, Gary Hull (yh82d7dfu at yandex.com) wrote:
>> My impression is that MailMate doesn't deal well with Gmail by 
>> design,
>> and there's no plan to natively support Gmail. MailMate is a
>> standards-based e-mail client that follows the various IMAP RFCs. 
>> Gmail
>> uses an undocumented proprietary fork/hack of IMAP ("GIMAP"). There's
>> only one developer for MailMate, and he has to prioritize. In 
>> addition,
>> Google could change things at any time and break MailMate, and given 
>> the
>> rumors that the results of the Sparrow acquisition are about to bear
>> fruit, it seems like it's in Google's interest to "encourage" Gmail
>> users to migrate to Google's own PC-side client, rather than use 
>> other
>> clients, so if, oops!, stuff "accidentally" starts to break in other
>> clients that try to support GIMAP, hey, that's the way the cookie
>> crumbles.
>>
>> However, in the MailMate documentation there are hacks given for 
>> those
>> who must use Gmail, the first of which is "Don't use labels," the 
>> second
>> of which is "If you do you use labels use one and only one label for
>> every each and every e-mail," and the third of which is "If you must 
>> use
>> labels as tags and put more than one on each e-mail, get used to a 
>> lot
>> of duplicated e-mails, because GIMAP presents labels as separate 
>> folders
>> to connecting IMAP clients."
>>
>> On 16 May 2014, at 16:28, Alasdair Muckart wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> For various reasons I've had to migrate all of my email out of the
>>> 'normal' (courier) IMAP server I was using over to Google (apps for
>>> business).
>>>
>>> The current documentation seems to indicate that MM still doesn't 
>>> deal
>>> too well with Gmail and labels, and with my current setup I really
>>> need the labels in Gmail.
>>>
>>> For the moment I'm using Airmail which is nice and fast and seems to
>>> handle gmails quirks Ok, but doesn't locally cache mail and is 
>>> having
>>> some issues actually finding all 270-odd thousand messages I have.
>>>
>>> I'd very much like to keep using MailMate, so I'm interested in what
>>> the options are for setting it up with Gmail in a way that'll allow 
>>> me
>>> to keep my label setup.
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>> --
>>> Alasdair Muckart | William de Wyke | http://wherearetheelves.net
>>> "There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a
>>> little worse
>>> and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only 
>>> are
>>> this man's
>>> lawful prey." - John Ruskin, 1819-1900.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> mailmate mailing list
>>> mailmate at lists.freron.com
>>> http://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>
> --
> Alasdair Muckart | William de Wyke | http://wherearetheelves.net
> "There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a 
> little worse
> and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are 
> this man's
> lawful prey." - John Ruskin, 1819-1900.
>
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