[MlMt] How to reliably move incoming messages to separate mailboxes?

[Pierre Igot]

Hi Rob,

Yes, if you are still using an older version of MailMate and relying this feature, you’ll be disappointed to hear that support for the Styles.plist was eliminated in versions more recent than r5964, which is the version (from several months ago) that I am still using right now. If you used rules and Styles.plist to colour your inbox messages based on IMAP tags and if you upgrade to a more recent release of MailMate, you’ll find that the messages still have their tags, but are no longer coloured based on the colour styles defined in that Styles.plist file.

I am personally very disappointed in this, because over the years I had built a whole system based on rules and IMAP tags, with rules assigning these tags based on various criteria. It seems to me that it should be pretty straightforward (but of course, I am not a developer) to offer, in the MailMate user interface, a way to (optionally) associate IMAP tags with colours for the message list. Alas, in spite of my repeated email queries to Benny about this, I have yet to hear back. So I am slowly starting to consider the possibility that this feature will never be added, and to explore how to use an alternate approach to achieve the same result, i.e. a unified mailbox with a list of new messages that are coloured not just based on the colour assigned to their parent account, but also based on IMAP tags assigned to them by my rules (regardless of their parent account).

The way to achieve this that I can see as a user is to automatically move incoming messages to specific mailboxes based on the same rule criteria as the ones I use to assign IMAP tags to them, with each mailbox assigned its own colour in MailMate and colouring its enclosed messages accordingly. Then I can create a smart mailbox that combines the contents of these various specific mailboxes and thus gives me a list of messages with different colours based on the specific mailbox that they are now part of.

But in order to achieve this, I need my rules to reliably move incoming messages to these specific mailboxes, which is where I am hitting a snag at this point. MOST of the time, the messages are automatically moved properly, but sometimes, even though I can tell that the rule “saw” the message (since it assigned the IMAP tag to it, which is the first action defined in the rule), the rule fails to move the message to the appropriate mailbox, and it leaves it in the inbox. And I don’t understand why and how to fix this.

Pierre

On 8 Nov 2023, at 14:19, Rob Russell wrote:

> On 9 Nov 2023, at 7:02, Pierre Igot wrote:
>
>> With the elimination in recent versions of MailMate of support for the “hidden” feature for colouring messages in the inbox message list using a file called Styles.plist,
>
> That's potentially disappointing. Do the recent versions have a direct version of colouring?
>
> Rob


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