[MlMt] Getting started with MailMate

[Matt]

Hi Benny!

I'm considering purchasing a number of MailMate licenses for myself and 
a few colleagues that deal with high volumes of email. I've spent the 
last 30 days diving in headfirst and seeing if it would help me manage 
our onslaught of email. It's got a number of big advantages, especially 
its power with regexes, but a few features are missing that are 
important for our workflow. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on 
whether: there are workarounds, I'm missing something obvious, or 
if/when you will implement this functionality.


# Sending email

1. **Automatic switching of SMTP server when sender changes.** I have 
one email account that receives emails for 3 different domains. You 
discussed this 
[here](https://lists.freron.com/mailmate/2016-January/005366.html) on 
the mailing list, but I wasn't subscribed then so I can't reply.
I have a separate SMTP login (via [Mailgun](http://www.mailgun.com)) for 
each of my domains in order to get DKIM and SPF correct. In MailMate, 
SMTP servers don't automatically update when I switch sending identities 
if they are part of the same IMAP account. This is a huge problem given 
how often I context switch between domains/identities/SMTP servers. Is 
there a way to do this, or a workaround (even if hacky)? This is my #1 
blocker to switching to MailMate from Postbox or Google Inbox in a 
browser.


# Sub-mailbox behavior

2. **Multi-level sub mailboxes.** I'd like to be able to have a tree of 
sub-mailboxes. Ideally, this would be as easy as putting a "/" in the 
"Mailbox name format". For example, INBOX/tag/recipient/sender could be:
`${##tags.tag.#name}/${#recipient.#identity}/${from.#correspondent.address}`

3. **Selective display of tags.** I'd like to be able to create a smart 
mailbox that only shows tags that contain (or don't contain) a given 
string. I can already figure out how to filter by emails that have tags 
containing a string, but the sub-mailboxes show all tags for those 
emails, not just the tags that were filtered on.
     * I want to use this to artificially and creatively mimic features 
that MailMate doesn't have. For example: follow-up dates, priority 
levels, who a task has been assigned to, etc.

4. **Sub-mailbox de-duping.** It seems that sub-mailboxes don't 
de-dupe/merge when they have the same name. This is unexpected behavior. 
For example, I have multiple ExampleService accounts (registered to 
"`xyz.exampleservicet at example.com`", "`abc.exampleservice at example.com`", 
etc.) and I use a filter like (below) which I was hoping would merge 
them. Instead, I end up with many sub-mailboxes named "exampleservice".
Filter I'm using:  
`${#recipient.#identity.user/.+\.(example1|exampleservice|example2)$/$1/}`


# Feature requests (not blockers, but would be beneficial):

5. **Some way to snooze an email, a sub-mailbox, or a tag.** In other 
words, to temporarily hide display but automatically bring it back 
later. I realize doing this system-wide (All Messages) would be kludgy 
and violate some of the spirit of MailMate. However, if I could somehow 
make it happen for a sub-mailbox **that would be game-changing. I would 
pay 2-4x the usual MailMate software license cost if it had this 
functionality.** I am imagining the sort of "view every morning at 7am" 
or "snooze until tomorrow" functionality that Google Inbox provides for 
a "bundle." (Which I actually use to auto-assign Gmail labels which 
connect to tags in MailMate)

6. **Follow-up dates.** I want to be able to flag an email with a 
follow-up date. This could be a tag or something else entirely. This 
way, I can have a smart mailbox that shows me emails by month or year. 
If you implemented the selective display of tags feature above, this 
could be hacked together by with a smart mailbox.

7. **Count of submailboxes.** "Displayed Count" currently has options 
for "All", "Unread", "Flagged", "Unreplied", and "Recent". It would be 
nice to have one additional option: "# of Submailboxes". For example, I 
have a "Tasks" smart mailbox that shows anything with tags that contain 
"Task_". It then shows submailboxes for each task by using mailbox name 
format `${##tags.tag.#name/Task_/_/}`. I'd like to have a count on that 
smart mailbox that shows how many tasks remain, rather than how many 
emails are assigned to a task bucket.

The combination of sub-mailbox counts, multi-level sub-mailboxes, 
selective display of tags, sub-mailbox deduping, and snoozes would 
create an incredibly customizable, flexible, and powerful mail 
management system. I can think of dozens of use cases that would be 
served.

# Ideas:
8. **Mailbox structure exposé on your website, along with UI export and 
import.** This isn't really necessary for us, per se, but it would be 
awesome. The idea would be to have a user-contributed directory on your 
website of mailbox structures along with some Reddit-esque up-voting and 
commenting functionality. For example, it would be awesome to see your 
structure ;). As I see it, the main strength of MailMate is mail 
management. You could leverage something like this to show off the power 
of the system. It could also be a great way to get the word out about 
MailMate.

Hopefully this doesn't come across as a laundry list. I really want to 
switch away from Google Inbox and Postbox, and would welcome your input.

Best,
Matthew Strax-Haber
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