[MlMt] Preserving tags

[Rick Holzgrafe]

We have a small email server box of our own, running Apple MacOS Server. 
We access it with Mailmate, and we use Mailmate’s tags feature heavily 
to organize our tens of thousands of messages.

Apple has announced that it will discontinue the mail server feature. We 
are going to have to move to a hosted server somewhere. (Helpful people: 
Please don’t respond with suggestions on how to avoid this move. 
I’ve been through all that already, thanks.) We intend to continue to 
use Mailmate after the move. (We really like Mailmate.)

This means that we need a way to preserve our archived mail. That’s 
easy enough—EagleFiler will do it, or we could just make a Finder copy 
of our cache folders. But these mechanisms do not preserve the tags 
(even though both EagleFiler and the Finder do support tagging), so we 
will lose all of our carefully-built-up organization.

Is there any way to preserve not just the mail, but also the tags that 
we have applied in Mailmate? I have explored the Application Support > 
Mailmate folder, but as far as I can tell the tag info is not stored 
there, except for a handy list of all the tag names.

As far as I know, we won’t be able to simply transfer our mail from 
our own server to a hosted server.

I’m a programmer; if I know where the info is kept, I might even be 
able to build some custom software to do the job for us… although I 
expect the task of (say) building my own “mail client” just to 
download mail and tags is pretty daunting.

Thanks for any help!

— Rick Holzgrafe
    rick at semicolon.com
    http://www.semicolon.com