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

[Robert Brenstein]

Thanks a lot to all posters. I am reading all posts carefully. It is 
nice to see that Mailmate has a real community of users, something 
that I truly appreciated about Eudora.

I am responding here to Bill since he most directly addressed my concerns.

On 14.06.2016 at 14:02 Uhr -0400 Bill Cole apparently wrote:
>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.

It seems that quite a few power mail users are still hanging on to 
using Eudora, so Mailmate can continue to grow its users base if it 
can manage to gain some repuation as a viable Eudora replacement, may 
be make a concious effort to add a few unique but popular Eudora 
features.

>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.

Good observation. Yes, I am running 10.6 on my main computer but I 
need to move on to 10.10 or 10.11 hence my intensified search for a 
replacement for Eudora. I already have a smaller laptop running 
Yosemite which I plan to use for testing Mailmate.

>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.

Good point. Fortunately, mailbox conversion will not be an issue for 
me, I hope. I am planning to archive all my Eudora mailboxes in Mail 
Archiver, which should give me easy enough access to past mail 
preserving the old structure which I know well, and start Mailmate 
fresh, with just the most recent mails. I have 19 years of mails in 
Eudora and I don't believe that such a collection can transfer 
cleanly, so I won't even try.

>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.

Yes, I am indeed painfully aware that some of my mail handling and 
usage will have to change. Changing workflows that have been working 
for years and developed to match the needs is not trivial, but must 
be done sometimes. I can already see that I won't be able to use mail 
as much for my to-do tasks and chores and may have to start using 
some calendar or CRM program.

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

I do not keep all messages. The statistics show how much I received. 
With mailing list posts, which is bulk of the volume, I read them 
selectively (relying heavily on mail concatenation function of 
Eudora) and delete anything unread after a year. I keep them for a 
year in case I need to check quickly if a certain issue has been 
raised or discussed lately. Select mails are shifted to "archive" 
mailboxes which are meant to be kept as reference forever or at least 
for a longer time.

>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.

I would be fine if I can set a fixed time span when an email is 
considered "new" and have smart mailboxes showing me where that is. I 
guess I need to connect Mailmate to one of my higher traffic accounts 
and see how that works. My initial testing was with two accounts that 
have very low traffic.

>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.

I guess I need to dig deeper into the settings since I haven't seen 
such a thing in Mailmate so far. Also, if the sync periodicity is not 
matched across all mailboxes, it won't help me much. I need definite 
time spans when no new mail comes at all.

>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.

Thanks for your feedback. Very useful.

One question: When I started Mailmate, it asked me to access my 
Address Book, which I refused. I keep the mail-related addressbook 
only in Eudora. The system addressbook serves a different purpose. 
However, I do not see any menu items related to an addressbook in 
Mailmate. Is it possible that it requires to use the system address 
book or I am just not seeing it yet?

Robert