[MlMt] Preserving tags

[Rick Holzgrafe]

Thanks, Paul. That might work, if our hosting service will support our 
large volumes of saved mail (probably yes, if I throw money at them) and 
if their server fully supports tags (I’m sure I can find one that 
does).

We are still among those who, in spite of Benny’s advice, would like 
to keep a local (and properly tagged) mail archive, so I’m still 
interested in finding a way to do that. But it’s good to know that we 
have at least one solution likely to work for us; thanks for that!

On 12 Feb 2018, at 15:38, Paul Sture wrote:

> One of the beauties of IMAP is that if you point your mail client at 
> two servers, you can drag existing mails from one server to the other. 
>  I initially did this to transfer stuff from a POP server/client setup 
> into IMAP with a different email provider.
>
> Where both servers are remote, everything which isn't cached locally 
> has to come down to your local machine, then out to the other one, so 
> it can take quite some time, but that's just a matter of patience.  
> Since you use your own MacOS server plus MailMate, the incoming leg of 
> that journey should be trivial.
>
> As far as the nitty gritty of the transfer goes, the last time I did 
> this was several years ago, but as far as I recall I created a dummy 
> account on the target IMAP system to dump everything into, then 
> created each account in turn and moved them into the right place.  The 
> only catch I recall was deciding when to change my MX records to point 
> at the new server, and ensuring that no emails arriving in the 
> transition period got lost.  Copious double checking satisfied me 
> there.
>
> On 13 Feb 2018, at 0:16, Rick Holzgrafe wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
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— Rick Holzgrafe
    rick at semicolon.com
    http://www.semicolon.com