[MlMt] Can mailmate support my workflow

[Bill Cole]

On 28 Apr 2015, at 14:40, Ralf Weber wrote:

> Moin!
>
> As some of my friends moved to mailmate and mail.app is giving me a 
> hard time at the moment I am considering to switching my UI mail 
> reader to mailmate. However reading up a bit on it and started playing 
> with it I am not sure if it can support my workflow or if I have to 
> change that, which might be hard as I want to continue to use mutt as 
> a non UI mail reader.
>
> So here's how my mail works today:
>
> - All mail (including a lot of mailing list traffic) come to my INBOX 
> (multiple accounts).
> - I then read that and based on certain criteria have rules that I 
> execute on a keystroke (mutt with marcos, mail.app with Mail-Act-On) 
> it is sorted into certain folders
> - I know that mail mate has smart folders, but as I want to continue 
> to use mutt I need the mails in real imap folders and not just 
> virtual.
>
> Is it possible to create that workflow and if how (pointers 
> appreciated)?

It should be possible using MailMate's custom key bindings. You can bind 
keys directly to specific "moveToMailbox:[mailbox-UUID]" actions or
the "applyRules" action, although a precise replication of your current 
workflow might not be obvious or elegant with the current implementation 
of Rules.

If I'm understanding you correctly:
1. You want all new mail to stay in INBOX until you've read it
2. You may choose to run one of many different rules on a message based 
on your human judgment. Which rule is run is determined by a single 
keystroke.
3. Each of your rules examines each message passed to it and decides 
programmatically to move it to one of many different folders, depending 
on features of the specific message.

That would be tricky but not impossible to set up with the current Rules 
implementation since there is no direct access to individual rules via 
keystroke, only to sets of rules associated with a mailbox (Smart or 
IMAP) and rulesets are applied to messages when they are added to a 
mailbox. I see Benny has already suggested one approach as I was 
thinking about this, but you also might consider creating a set of 
mailboxes that exist solely as Rule receptacles, and use key-bound 
moveToMailbox commands to drop messages into those intermediate 
mailboxes, each of which has a ruleset that does the "real" move.