[MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 25 Aug 2015, at 13:03, Brian Scholl wrote:

> Also, a more theoretical postscript: It seems to me that Benny's 
> reluctance
> to pursue any sort of .mbox export or local folder option stems from 
> the
> notion that such things are intrinsically in opposition to the entire
> notion/purpose of IMAP.  For example, in one of the ticket replies 
> about
> such things once upon a time, he wrote: "MailMate really is IMAP only 
> and I
> don't have any current plans to change that. Essentially (if you think
> about it), 'On My Mac' support is the same as supporting POP3. 
> Messages are
> only temporarily stored on the server."

I do like being quoted :-)

> That doesn't seem right to me.  Embracing the IMAP worldview but then 
> also
> limiting the size and complexity of online accounts by periodically
> allowing them to be culled to local-only long-term-storage archives 
> doesn't
> feel the same to me as just using POP3 in a different way.  
> Conversely, it
> seems like allowing for a local .mbox export (or something like that) 
> in MM
> wouldn't be some sort of betrayal of its underlying nature.  Rather, 
> it
> would just be a way for users to adapt true day-to-day IMAP usage to a
> longer-term archiving practice.

POP3 has often been used in a way where fetched messages are not deleted 
immediately, but instead deleted on the server after a certain number of 
days. This allows multiple clients to fetch the emails before they 
disappear. This is what I mean with “temporary storage”. Granted, 
IMAP+local is better than POP3, but that was not my point. My point was 
that MailMate is an IMAP client and specifically *not* a POP3 client. 
Local messages would essentially allow MailMate to be used as a POP3 
client and I'd really prefer if users did not do that.

I'm not saying that *you* do not have good reasons to want local storage 
(or POP3), but I don't believe the majority of users need it -- in fact 
I think it should be discouraged. MailMate is very flexible and you can 
get POP3 like behavior if you really insist (as described in my other 
email), but I'm unlikely to ever make it a straightforward feature.

> (A concrete example: I teach classes at a university, and during each
> semester I will accrete huge online IMAP folders with emails relating 
> to
> those classes.  But then once the relevant semester has finished, I 
> just
> hate the idea of keeping those folders online forever.  Even just the 
> sheer
> *number* of such folders would become awkward and distracting over 
> time,
> not to mention the messages they contain.  But I also don't just want 
> to
> delete those messages forever -- since maybe once per year I'll have a 
> need
> to dive into a previous semester's folders to find something.  So this 
> is
> practice some sort of betrayal of how I'm supposed to use IMAP?)

If you have webmail then I would probably do it the other way round. I 
would use “Edit Subscriptions” in the IMAP account editor in 
MailMate to unsubscribe the mailbox. That would leave the messages on 
the IMAP server only and if needed they can be searched via webmail (or 
even subscribed again if needed a lot). This would also save local disk 
space.

> Do others feel similarly?  Am I just thinking about this the wrong 
> way?

You are certainly not alone, but some changes are hard. I've been in 
numerous POP3 vs IMAP discussions over the years, but now it seems that 
POP3 is rarely mentioned. Instead the (very similar) need for local 
messages comes up quite often. The best argument for that is privacy, 
but (some day) I would like to solve that problem in a different way 
(encryption).

I hope that clarifies my point of view.

-- 
Benny
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