[MlMt] Local email archiving status/options?

[Brian Scholl]

Thanks to everyone for the quick and very helpful responses.  A few
thoughts and followup questions:

Clearly there are plenty of workarounds to try for local-only archiving, so
I'll make something work.  I'm still hesitant to try any of the local IMAP
server options (and I have great server-side SPAM handling already through
my university), but it sounds to me like my best bet for creating a
long-term-storage archive might just be to export .eml files directly from
MM (via the EF bundle, via dragging-to-the-finder, or by stealing them from
MM's private ~/Library/ directory) and then have EagleFiler
translate/collate them into an .mbox archive for long term storage.  As
long as that will work for folders of ~ 1000 messages at a time (and will
preserve the dates, etc.), that sounds fine.

(And I'm also glad to learn from Bill Cole about the formail shell option
to produce the .mbox file directly; I'll play with the date stuff and see
how close I can get with that too.)

But I do hold out some hope that maybe we can still convince Benny to just
hold his nose and provide an IMAP-folder-to-.mbox command in MM itself.
Maybe this will happen if we all just keep politely asking for this --
especially if we intimate that otherwise we will be using Mail.app as a MM
utility, and/or that we will be poking around in MM's local files despite
the warnings?

Benny wrote:
> 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 also resonate with the privacy argument.  And I'm not sure about others,
but at least for me this isn't the primary driver of the local-archive
request: even if MM had some great encryption option, I'd still want a
local archive option just as much.

Benny wrote:
> I'm afraid no matter how I implement it then
> I'll have reports about it failing to be imported in some other app and
> in the end I'll need options for every variant of the `.mbox` format.
> But I won't really know before it's implemented. It might not be that
> bad.

It's also possible that the people who want this particular feature will be
able to cope with different .mbox formats by themselves (or that people
will be able to easily use other utilities such as Emailalchemy to do any
further translation that might be necessary)?

I worry instead that if you provide an IMAP-folder-to-local-.mbox export
command after all, you'll just drown in a chorus of "Thank you!"s...

Bill Cole wrote:
> As someone who has retained email for 20+ years including a substantial
> spam corpus (it's a professional focus) I share the desire for a local,
> integrated, purely private, and reliable mail archive.

That seems like another great example.  Benny, would you really just
recommend that Bill keep 20 years of SPAM online?  (I'm worried that the
answer will just be an enthusiastic 'yes!', but that seems like an
unacceptable option to me.)

Benny wrote:
> 2. Setup a dummy IMAP account in MailMate which is always offline and
> then see if you can use some variant of what I suggest in [this
> ticket](https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/733).

Has anyone made this work well?  I haven't seen anyone on the list or in
that ticket reply that this has worked for them.  (In the ticket Benny
notes that he hasn't actually tried it.  And it sounds like Bill Cole tried
this but didn't test it fully?)

Michael Tsai wrote:
> Currently, MailMate sends EagleFiler .eml files:
> <http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/help/importing-mail-from-mai>
>
> However, you can merge them into mbox files for greater efficiency
> if you want:
> <http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/help/merge-mailboxes-message>

Do you have any thoughts about whether this would work for bulk archiving
-- e.g. if I wanted to take the entire contents of a ~ 1000-message IMAP
folder, send them all in one step to EagleFiler from MM, and then convert
the results (and only those results) into a single .mbox file?

(And does this option successfully preserve all of the dates, unlike the
simple version of Bill Cole's formail shell command?)

If so, I'm tempted to just use this (especially since this would mean never
having to open Mail.app).  (And thanks for the quick reply, Michael; I will
also eagerly be buying an EagleFiler license shortly!)

Bill Cole wrote:
> I'm surprised that no one in this thread has yet mentioned the simple
> ability to select messages in a MM message list and drag them to a
> Finder window: a very fast way to create a file-per-message offline
> local archive.

Same question: would this work well (and in a date-preserving way, etc.)
for ~ 1000 messages at a time, with the results then imported into
EagleFiler and transmuted into a single .mbox?

But it seems like my best bet really might be to just skip the export step
(via the EF bundle or dragging-to-finder or creating a zombie/offline IMAP
account) altogether, and just periodically steal the archive directly from
~/Library/.../Messages/ -- and then (1) import them directly into
EagleFiler while using it's option to turn them all into a single .mbox
file, after which I can (2) relaunch MM and manually delete all of the
messages in that folder.

Beyond Benny's dire in-principle warnings about doing this, is there any
reason this wouldn't work (for now) in practice?

Bill Cole wrote:
> (Tangent: Senior mail admins are insanely over-represented on this
> mailing list.)

My theory is that anyone young enough to never have used Eudora simply
doesn't know what they're missing, and so wouldn't experience the same
dissatisfaction w/ all of the other non-MailMate clients that are currently
actively developed.

Thanks again,

-Brian
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