[MlMt] Syncing settings between machines?

[Bill Cole]

On 2 Feb 2021, at 21:43, Nicholas Vahalik wrote:

> Apologies if this has been addressed elsewhere.

It has been discussed here before. Here are two of the times that it has 
come up:

https://mailmate.freron.narkive.com/C29rlbuH/mlmt-sync-mailmate-settings
https://mailmate.freron.narkive.com/14k120v0/mlmt-syncing-mailboxes#post4

There is also a long-standing ticket: 
https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/430

> I’d really like to be able to sync up my Smart Mailbox configuration 
> between machines. This is especially painful when the Smart Mailbox 
> rules can take several minutes to build.

Rules that take actions on messages are especially problematic to have 
on more than one machine. If both machines are on and watching the same 
IMAP account(s) with the same Smart Mailboxes using the same rules, you 
can get race conditions.

I have a chronic problem of IMAP sessions going into an infinite loop 
which may be caused by this but which is quite hard to diagnose in depth 
because of the volume of logs produced. See 
https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672-mailmate/tickets/1491 
for details.

> Is there a simple way to keep that configuration in sync between 
> machines?

Yes, although you may not like it and I don't recommend it. You must 
have the same IMAP accounts configured on both machines.

1. Quit MM on both machines
2. Copy all /Users/dad/Library/ApplicationSupport/MailMate/*.plist files 
from the machine whose config you want to keep to the other machine.
3. Repeat every time you want to switch machines.

Simple, yes?

> A shell-script ssh/scp/rsync setup would be OK as well.

The above steps should be fairly simple to turn into a shell script, 
given mutual trust between the 2 machines.

If you do this, it is best to only ever have MM up on one of the 
machines.

An alternative approach (which I use) is to do the above steps once, and 
then remove all rules from all mailboxes (including both "Smart" and 
"Source" mailboxes) on the machine that is more frequently offline. I 
did this to avoid races and so I can leave the desktop instance running 
all of the time, doing all of the automation (e.g. rules that move new 
messages to the appropriate mailbox as they arrive.)

-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com or billcole at apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire