[MlMt] will MailMate be a good mail mate for me?

[Benjamin Coddington]

Hi Robert,

On 9 Jun 2016, at 20:24, Robert Brenstein wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
> I am still using Eudora but I am looking at MailMate as its successor. I
> suspect that there are a number of ex-Eudora users here. The basic
> features and operation of MailMate seem fine.
>
> In Eudora, I am using POP3 exclusively but switching to IMAP only should
> not be an issue per se. I do not need to access my mail on any other
> device than my computer, so IMAP offers no true benefit for me. POP is
> configured to leave messages on the server for 2 weeks in case I need to
> access them through webmail. I am more concerned about the workflow and
> functionality.
>
> I have 18 personalities, that is 18 different mail addresses and almost as
> many service providers. I am receiving on average 8500 messages a month.
> Snapshot of my Eudora stats is here to see:
> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13693400/Screenshot-Eudora-Stats.png
>
> Most of the traffic, probably like 70% of it, are mailing lists, over 200
> of them. I do not, of course, read all those messages but only selected
> threads. All incoming messages are sorted out by filters into close to 300
> mailboxes. What is left in the inbox is some junk that sneaked thru spam
> filters and a few misc messages. I rely on Eudora opening windows for
> mailboxes with messages that freshly arrived -- with almost all mailboxes
> containing unread messages, the unread mail counters like in Apple Mail
> are useless for me.

Your traffic and usage patterns are similar to mine.  I have far more mail
delivered and archived than I would like MM to index, and I require a rich
mail filtering/delivery language.

My solution has been to run a local dovecot server with MM as a primary MUA
on top of that.  Delivery (or reaping from my external IMAP accounts) is
done using fetchmail (which you can schedule on your desired interval), and
because I deliver to dovecot I can use Pigeonhole/Sieve for it's excellent
filtering features.  An additional plus is that sieve can set IMAP tags on
delivery, making for a very nice meta data integration with MM's unicode
Tags column, so that certain mail stands out in different ways based upon
criteria or actions in sieve.

To keep things snappy in MailMate, I disable IMAP subscriptions to my large
number of archive/list mailboxes to prevent the local storage and indexing
redundancy, but I can always fire up Alpine or Mutt to dig through those
archives to find and respond to messages within.

The killer feature for MM is that I can "silence" or "ignore" maillist
threads that I don't want to see in my INBOX any longer.  I can deliver to
both my INBOX and my list archive mailbox, but safely delete or ignore
threads that I know I have no interest in.  This really cuts down on my
INBOX delivery rate, at the same time I can see new topics that may require
my attention.

Ben

> It seems that MailMate does not support local mailboxes, that is having
> mail copied off the server to my computer. MailMate advertisement states
> that it offers "Full Offline Access." However, the following description
> mentions only administrative functions. Keeping many thousands of mails on
> the servers must affect performance.
>
> On the other hand, having full offline access to emails (not just subjects
> but all content and attachments) and all email-related functions is
> essential. Besides working totally offline, I also often work at locations
> with slow Internet access.
>
> Another feature that is essential for me is that new mail is checked only
> every 30 mins, which is, of course, because of the volume of mail I get.
>
> So, will MailMate be a good mail client for me?
>
> Robert _______________________________________________ mailmate mailing
> list mailmate at lists.freron.com https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate