[MlMt] Mail archiving best practice

[Bill Cole]

On 19 Jan 2015, at 16:00, Kai Großjohann wrote:

> On that token, I've installed Dovecot, I'm running that on my MacBook, 
> and I copy mails there for archival purposes.  However, I'm not clear 
> whether this means they are spotlight-searchable.  (Probably not.)
>
> Hm.  Is there a Spotlight indexer for Dovecot-flavored Maildir?

Dovecot's flavor of Maildir 
(http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir) does not follow the 
strictures necessary to fit the mis-designed Spotlight indexing 
framework.

MailMate's local cache of messages (~/Library/Application 
Support/MailMate/Messages) technically *IS* indexed by Spotlight in a 
useless manner complicated by the fact that Apple lays claim to anything 
with a ".eml" filename extension, defining the filetype badly and 
providing no importer plugin.

Spotlight and the entangled QuickLook and Launch Services frameworks are 
a mess of bad system design choices and shoddy implementation by Apple, 
rooted in the adoption of filename extensions as the ultimate authority 
in classifying files.