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

[Bill Cole]

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 used Mac Eudora for ~16 years as my primary MUA. I tried to make the 
Eudora-faced Thunderbird work as well for my multi-account, 
multi-identity, list-heavy, email flow and it was a massive 
disappointment and time-sink. I tried every Mac mail client I could find 
over the space of about 4 years, looking for anything that I could live 
with instead of fight with and eventually something my very picky boss, 
a longtime Claris Emailer user with a similar complex and heavy mail 
stream, could tolerate. I'm a senior (i.e. old, tired, and cynical) 
sysadmin and have managed mail servers and supported and used a wide 
ranges of MUAs for over 20 years, so I'm biased towards flexibility, 
formal correctness, and security. My boss is much the same, with a few 
years on me...

MailMate is the only MUA that I have liked since giving up on Eudora 
6.2.4. It's the only MUA my boss would move to himself and bless as a 
company standard. Based on our experiences and on those of most of my 
colleagues who have moved to MM, I expect that anyone with "old school" 
email proclivities and a lot of email will find it the only serious 
option on MacOS X. I also find it telling that I see names popping up on 
this list of people who I've looked up to professionally for many years 
as technical experts and people who have helped preserve email as the 
Internet's "killer app" under the toxic pressures of spam and other 
abuse. People who know and love email use MailMate.

HOWEVER: The fact that you're still using "real" Mac Eudora (i.e. 6.2.4, 
not "Eudora OSE") and the window style in your screenshot implies an 
impediment in moving to MailMate: OS version. MM is distributed as a 
x86_64 binary and requires MacOS X 10.7 (Lion). Eudora 6.2.4, the last 
version, was a PowerPC-only application and so requires Rosetta to run 
on any Intel Mac. Rosetta does not exist for any MacOS version past 
10.6, so you are clearly running a system version that cannot run 
MailMate. If you cannot upgrade to Lion (e.g. if you have a 1st 
generation Core Duo or PowerPC Mac) MM is not an option for you at all.

Also, mailbox conversion can be a real problem, which is a Eudora issue 
NOT a MailMate issue. For most of my 4 years wandering in the wilderness 
looking for a decent MUA, I still occasionally launched Eudora 6 to 
access ancient mail because the conversion tools for the classic Eudora 
mailbox format all were a bit broken. It was not until I found a program 
called "Emailchemy" (and got a couple of minor bugs in it fixed) that I 
was able to convert my whole Eudora archive cleanly into a form that 
actually worked with any modern MUA. I chose to have Emailchemy convert 
to a form that it made accessible via a trivial read-only IMAP server, 
but it can go to other conversion formats that MM can import.

> 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 resisted IMAP for a long time because Eudora made it feasible to have 
multiple devices using the same account with only one of them (my main 
personal Mac running Eudora) ever deleted anything. The workflow 
definitely changes with IMAP, even with a single client, because your 
definitive mailstore is the server. That forces a change of mindset and 
for many people, a deep trust in a mail provider. In my case, I run most 
of the IMAP servers I use and own the most important one (and can put my 
hands on it 24x7) so the trust issue is reduced. If you have shoddy or 
shady mail providers, IMAP (and so MailMate) is problematic.

> I have 18 personalities, that is 18 different mail addresses and 
> almost as many service providers.

That should not be an issue for MM. My current primary system has MM set 
up with 8 IMAP accounts on 8 different servers plus 2 fakes that are 
permanently offline, one of those being the giant Emailchemy import from 
my old Eudora. A fake always-offline "source" is effectively frozen in 
MM: all the message data is there but you can't do anything useful with 
it.

I have an unknown number of unique addresses because of how I configure 
my personal mailserver, such that various patterns are acceptable to it 
which route to a single local address which is sorted by a chaotic mix 
of procmail on the server and MUA-side rules. As someone using a single 
Mac with MailMate, there's no reason you couldn't convert all of your 
Eudora rules into MM rules that actually move messages into various IMAP 
mailboxes OR into "smart" virtual mailboxes in MM.

> 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

Throw some of that away. You can't need a million messages. :)

Unlike some of the others responding here, I prefer mixing the use of 
real IMAP folders with "Smart Mailboxes" because directories with very 
large numbers of messages are inherently slow on MacOS and very large 
mailboxes can be on some mail servers as well. This problem isn't as 
pronounced as it used to be, but it's still real. Because MM uses a 
mailbox=directory, message=file storage model for its local cache of 
messages mirroring the mailbox hierarchy of the server, is very useful 
for performance to have rules that move new messages into other IMAP 
mailboxes as they arrive and to have habits for datewise archiving 
and/or deletion of mail.

That said, my main system's MailMate has ~500k messages in its database. 
This was a problem when I only had 8GB of RAM and MM was less careful 
about memory. It is no problem with 32GB. My 8GB secondary machine only 
has ~250k messages (missing my 1993-2006 archives) and while that makes 
MailMate a major memory user on the system, it isn't crashy or 
particularly slow, particularly in recent versions. I would not want to 
try a million messages on the 8GB Mac.

> 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.

This is the One True Correct Way for handling a big mailstream. All 
other email workflows are less efficient as well as intellectually and 
morally suspect. :)

(only 60% kidding...)

> 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.

The well-conceived multi-window behavior of old Eudora is one of the few 
things I miss in MailMate. You can approach something similar with a mix 
of real and smart mailboxes, for example I have a "recent public list 
mail" smart folder which has all of the past 2 weeks of all public lists 
I subscribe to, drawn from the real IMAP mailboxes I sort each list 
into. It has automatic  subfolders for each list with recent traffic.

MailMate does not currently handle the IMAP "\Recent" flag correctly, so 
if you set it up to check mail on a slow POP-like schedule, you have no 
automatic way to see "what was newly-arrived in my last check." You 
could mimic that with the right combination of rules attached to IMAP 
mailboxes and smart mailboxes, *I THINK*. I have opened a bug on the 
\Recent flaw so maybe Benny will fix it soon.

> 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.

As others have noted, MM actually keeps a full copy of all messages in 
its local cache, mirroring the mailboxes to which you are subscribed on 
the server. This can cause performance issues (as noted above) because 
MacOS is not good with directories that have many items in them, but it 
isn't bad if you avoid really individual single IMAP mailboxes.

> 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.

Because MM keeps a full replica of all messages in the server-side 
mailboxes to which you you are subscribed (typically all of them) and 
IMAP messages are immutable except for existence and metadata (i.e. 
whether a message exists in a mailbox and what its status flags are) you 
can do anything you want to messages while an account is offline and the 
only difference between that and being online is that changes like 
deleting a message or marking it as read or moving it to a different 
mailbox won't be made until your next synch with the server.

> 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.

Each account has its own default synch periodicity (5/10/30/60 minutes 
or manually only) and each IMAP mailbox can have its own special synch 
schedule, including "Connected" mode, an IMAP feature where the client 
sends an "IDLE" command within a mailbox and waits for the server to 
tell it when there's any change.

> So, will MailMate be a good mail client for me?

It could be, if you have a system up to handling it and are willing to 
rework your whole Eudora setup into a rough equivalent in MailMate. For 
the first issue, MailMate with a million messages is likely to want at 
least a couple GB of live memory (not "compressed" or swapped to disk) 
all to itself. A rough rule of thumb is that MM's indexing database uses 
about 1/3 as much disk space as the messages it has indexed and MM will 
need 1/2-3/4 of the indexing database in either live or compressed 
memory, with performance getting worse as more of that is compressed. 
The conversion issue is a harder one to evaluate, since it depends to 
some degree on how picky you are about message conversion and how 
orderly your Eudora rules are. There are  "good enough" message 
conversion paths for non-obsessives that are free and there's Emailchemy 
(not free) if you demand perfection in all details. There are no tools 
for rule translation and the logical structure of how MM applies rules 
is entirely different from Eudora.

With those warnings, I can imagine many reasons to NEED to move on from 
Eudora and I can't name any other MacOS MUA that comes anywhere close to 
being a fit replacement for Eudora with your sort of use. Switching 
won't be easy and painless, but it would be better than trying to switch 
to any other MacOS MUA.