[MlMt] Trying to understand tags/folders for GMail

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 24 May 2014, at 0:38, Jonathan Clark wrote:

> I've been using MM for many months with GMail, but decided it was time 
> to
> try out the new feature that appeared some months ago. From the 
> release
> notes at the time:
>
>> Recently, I implemented a workaround in MailMate for the problem of
>> multiple labels. It is currently an experimental solution and you can
>> enable it following the instructions in the release notes for version 
>> 1.7.
>> In short, MailMate can be told to handle specific Gmail labels as if 
>> they
>> were tags. If a label is handled as a tag then MailMate automatically
>> ignores the corresponding IMAP mailbox. Tags are already supported by
>> MailMate (no integration with Mavericks yet) and uses IMAP keywords 
>> on
>> standard IMAP servers.
>
>
> This has left me a little uncertain about what I should change, and 
> what
> the end result will be. As it might well be the same for others, I 
> thought
> I'd ask some questions about it here, before I dive in and make some
> changes.

Note that I also wrote a blog post about it 
[here](http://blog.freron.com/2013/mavericks-gmail-apple-mail-and-mailmate/).

> I have about 30 GMail "folders" based on the topic of the message, and 
> I
> move email to one and only one of them as quickly as possible, if it 
> needs
> to be kept.

Folders used as folders are fine. You should just continue using them as 
you do now.

> I also have "_todo" and "_waiting" folders that I also often
> copy messages to alongside the other folder.

These are what I would consider to be labels/tags/flags/keywords. These 
messages have a primary location and are then labelled/tagged/... as a 
way to categorize them beyond that primary location.

> I'm guessing that I should be moving the folders "_todo" and 
> "_waiting" to
> be tags, leaving the others as folders?

Yes, you can create the tags “ToDo” and “Waiting” in MailMate 
and then make sure that they are mapped to your existing Gmail labels 
“_todo” and “_waiting”.

> But what are the practical benefits
> of this?

If you do the above then the IMAP mailboxes in MailMate named 
“_todo” and “_waiting” should disappear when the account is 
synchronized (you might need to explicitly do that). Any messages with 
these labels are instead going to appear as tagged in MailMate (with 
ToDo and Waiting). You should create smart mailboxes with, for example, 
the condition: “Tags/Keywords” include “ToDo”.

> It's not as if my current method is really broken.

1. It's about avoiding duplicate messages. In your current setup, a 
message located in both “_todo” and in one of your other mailboxes 
is going to be fetched and stored twice by MailMate.
2. It's about treating labels as tags. If something is used as a label 
(and not a mailbox) then this is also how it should be used in MailMate. 
In MailMate it is known as tags, but it's the same thing. Using the 
“T” shortcut you can easily add/remove your labels/tags.
3. It's about migration. If you ever need to move messages from Gmail to 
some other IMAP server (or the other way) then tags are preserved.

In theory, MailMate could do like Gmail and try to identify duplicates 
and somehow treat them as one, but this would require major and tricky 
changes to how MailMate behaves internally. (This is, I believe, what 
Apple Mail is trying to do.) I've taken a different route in which Gmail 
labels used as tags need to be identified as tags. I'm not saying it 
works perfectly yet, but I do believe it is the best way to handle Gmail 
via IMAP without making a Gmail-client.

-- 
Benny
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