[MlMt] Preserving tags

[Rick Holzgrafe]

You’re the second person to suggest running a local Dovecot server. 
One of the bits of good news in all this was that I was looking forward 
to letting experts worry about the server stuff. I’m not an expert, 
and maintaining our own server has been a nightmare. So I’m a bit 
allergic to the notion of continuing to run even a limited server.

But y’all are saying it’s “fairly simple”, and Fredrik Jonsson 
has contributed a web page he wrote that explains how to do it in 
detail. So thanks to you both, and I will definitely keep it in mind!

On 12 Feb 2018, at 23:05, Bill Cole wrote:

> On 12 Feb 2018, at 18:16, Rick Holzgrafe wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> The tags are stored on the server as IMAP "keywords" a.k.a. "flags."
>
> This is a standard part of the IMAP protocol, but support for 
> user-defined keywords/flags is sparse. MacOS X Server uses Dovecot as 
> its IMAP server and so supports an arbitrary collection of keywords. 
> Many email service providers (e.g. Microsoft) have IMAP keyword 
> support so limited that it might as well not exist. Others (e.g. 
> Google) conflate flags/keywords and folder names, so massive weirdness 
> can occur.
>
> BOTTOM LINE: You cannot count on a mailbox storage & access provider 
> to support existing MailMate tags. If they use Dovecot, Cyrus, or 
> Courier, you may be able to just drag messages across and let MM do 
> the work. Otherwise? Who knows.
>
> POSSIBLE SOLUTION: It's fairly simple to yank the mailboxes out of the 
> MacOS X Server mailstore and drop them into a MacPorts (or Homebrew or 
> handmade) installation of Dovecot.
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— Rick Holzgrafe
    rick at semicolon.com
    http://www.semicolon.com