[MlMt] Transferring mailmate config

[Bill Cole]

On 7 Nov 2017, at 8:06 (-0500), Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:

> On 7 Nov 2017, at 8:18, Robert M. Münch wrote:
>
>> On 6 Nov 2017, at 21:46, Vlad Ghitulescu wrote:
>>
>>> Seeing that this question arise again: Benny, wouldn't be possible 
>>> to have a menu-item / preference-button for exporting everything 
>>> that make sense (like a backup-capsule :-) in order to start with 
>>> MailMate on a new machine / os / etc.?
>>
>> How about just exporting these files on Dropbox/... and importing 
>> them again on startup if they are available? Keeping configs in sync 
>> on many machines is really a key-feature these days.
>
> I agree with this. I do think it would be a nice feature to at least 
> synchronize mailboxes, signatures, and tags. It's just one of those 
> features I keep on postponing.
>
> Synchronizing account settings would be tricky although I haven't 
> thought about it in detail.

I miss the old "MobileMe" prefs sync. It *mostly* worked...

In theory, an app can use the NSUbiquitousKeyValueStore class to sync 
prefs between multiple devices, but it has an issue. From the Apple 
docs:

    "To use this class, you must distribute your app through the App 
Store or Mac App Store"

One thing that MIGHT work for the settings that are in the 'defaults' 
subsystem  (I have not tried it, because I value my email...) is to use 
its "export" and "import" subcommands to dump the settings to a file 
that can be loaded on another machine. That has all sorts of problematic 
edge cases, such as the fact that in my case the 2 machines I would be 
keeping in sync are a 27" iMac and a 13" Macbook. The different screen 
sizes mean that I don't want the same window sizes or default layouts or 
columns or even fonts on both machines. So if a dump/load approach was 
used, there would need to be some way to protect machine-specific 
settings.