[MlMt] default columns keep forgetting its state

[Bill Cole]

On 15 Mar 2017, at 18:16, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:

> On 13 Mar 2017, at 23:01, Max Rydahl Andersen wrote:
>
>> Im back to having to keep changing "date received" to "Date received 
>> (relative)" on almost every mailbox again.
>>
>> No matter of "set default columns" seem to fix this.
>>
>> Any reminders on how to fix this again or is it a regression?
>
> I think it's the same level of “bugginess” as it has been for a 
> long time (too long). Resetting mailbox related states can be done 
> like this:
>
> 	defaults delete com.freron.MailMate MmMailboxRelatedStates

I THINK I've found a less aggressive solution that may help figuring out 
the mechanism of the bug...

Somehow I obtained a sticky de facto "default" that only made sense for 
aggregated mailboxes: From, To, Subject, Date (sorted newest first), 
Attachments, Source Mailbox. I repeatedly changed various mailboxes and 
used "Use as Default Columns" but it never stuck. The problem persisted 
across restarts.

I quit MM and went digging into the preferences to find where those 
columns were being persisted across launches. Eventually I worked up a 
shell pipeline to see an abridgment of the per-mailbox settings small 
enough to correlate enabled columns to mailbox identifiers:

     defaults read com.freron.MailMate MmMailboxRelatedStates |
       egrep -B5 -A7 '(messagesOutlineView|enabledColumns) =' |
       egrep '[[:alpha:]]{2}' | sed '/^  *"imap/s/^ */\
/' |
       egrep -v '^(                       | *sortDesc)'

(NOTE: the 'sed' command has an embedded escaped newline in its 
replacement pattern.)

This kicks out a series of stanzas extracted from the mailbox layout 
dictionaries, effectively snipping out ~100 lines of "columnStates" and 
PList formatting which make it hard to correlate the mailbox name and 
its list of enabled columns. With that condensed view, it was easy to 
pick out which mailboxes had the "sticky" de facto default columns 
enabled. In may case, that was "ALL MESSAGES" and the top-level view for 
my main account.

So I started up MM and went to each of those mailboxes, changing each to 
the layout I wanted and using the "Use as Default Columns" command. This 
resulted in an encouraging sign: both "Use as Default Columns" and 
"Revert to Default Columns" grayed out, implying that the mailboxes were 
using the defaults. And indeed, after doing that, no other mailbox came 
up with the bad layout. Problem solved!

I followed the same steps successfully on my other Mac, where only the 
top-level aggregate for my main account had the bad sticky layout. The 
implication seems to be that non-default column layouts are sometimes 
inherited from a parent or grandparent.