[MlMt] Does MailMate mirror everything back to the server?

[Jan Erik Moström]

On 20 Feb 2018, at 21:08, Ron Britton wrote:

> I'm trying to keep an open mind.  Just because I've done things one 
> way for 25
> years doesn't mean it's best (usually the opposite).

:D

> I tried IMAP a couple of years ago, and I just wasn't happy having to 
> go onto
> the server to get copies of emails I needed to look at again.

Strange, I've never had that happen on a laptop - all email have been 
cached locally by the clients I've used.

> MailMate would
> allow me to find it on my hard drive, but then why do I need a copy 
> sitting up
> on the server?  This is obviously a philosophical question about 
> approach to
> email.

Yes, when I switched to IMAP (when I bought my first iPhone and wanted 
to access email from it) I had some "mental issues" with this but I've 
changed my mind. Having the emails on the server as well as on laptop 
have made my life easier, I have the emails in two places, I can easily 
try new mail clients or use two email clients on the same machine (yep, 
it happens), or use different computers/laptop/ipad/phone/etc. It's 
really easy and fast to try something new and/or move around - if I'm 
really desperate all I need is a browser and I can access the email from 
almost anywhere (happens 1-2 times/year).

> The need to access from more than one machine is a possibility in the 
> future.
> Maybe I could try to keep only emails from the last month or year on 
> the
> server and within MailMate.  Older stuff that I still want I could 
> offload to
> my main computer.  Elsewhere on this list, people have discussed 
> archiving
> emails.  DevonThink, EagleFiler, and Foxtrot were mentioned.  I could 
> look
> into some sort of approach using one of those.

My personal take on this: don't bother (if you have the disk space), 
none of the email archiving solutions I've seen does a really good job. 
It's way easier to keep them all on the server, once again assuming you 
have the disk space but emails takes up surprisingly little disk space 
(at least for me) - for example, my ISP gives me 100GB disk storage and 
I'm not anywhere close to use up but a fraction of this (I had to check, 
it's a few procent) and at work I have unlimited storage.

So in my case the solutions would be (assuming you already have normal 
backup):

1. Don't bother - my current strategy

2. Move the email to be archived into specific mailbox (by year?) and
    stop subscribing to them. This way you have the emails available by
    simply subscribing to the mailboxes.

3. If I didn't have disk space I would probably start up an IMAP server
    on my NAS at home and use that as a storage solution.

4. My final alternative which I've done a number of times is to save the
    mailbox(es) to a text file and in addition store the email in 
Devonthink.
    That way I have one backup that let me recover my mails in my mail 
client
    and a quick way to search old emails.

= jem