[MlMt] Preserving tags

[Steven M. Bellovin]

MacOS Server uses Dovecot; if your new mail host runs Dovecot, I think 
that the tags will transfer.

If they're friendly, you'll be able to copy over the Dovecot 
directories. However, when I did that on a (non-Apple) Dovecot server I 
run, I had to delete the dovecot.index* files.

On 12 Feb 2018, at 18:46, Rick Holzgrafe wrote:

> 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
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> mailmate mailing list
>>> mailmate at lists.freron.com
>>> https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
>> _______________________________________________
>> mailmate mailing list
>> mailmate at lists.freron.com
>> https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
>
> — Rick Holzgrafe
>    rick at semicolon.com
>    http://www.semicolon.com
>
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> https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate



         --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb