[MlMt] tags and email client

[Bill Cole]

On 2024-06-08 at 07:14:09 UTC-0400 (Sat, 8 Jun 2024 13:14:09 +0200)
aisrael <mailmate at lists.freron.com>
is rumored to have said:

> Following these email exchanges with Scott and Benny, I finally went to the advanced Search settings of Preside, and much to my surprise, I was able to access 25 of my Mailmate tags (why 25 among the ~100 I use, this is beyond my limited understanding). This is supposed to be impossible, but it seems to work??????

It is almost entirely a server-side issue, as Benny said. However, MM has a slightly quirky feature of using its own private "tag" names that it maps to arbitrary IMAP keywords as defined in the Tags prefs pane so other MUAs do not actually see the MM tag, they see the IMAP keyword. Any MUA should be able to see any keyword set by MM, IF the server supports user-defined keywords.

Beyond that, you may be running into a server-side limitation. I do not know if it remains true, but historically Dovecot (the most common open source IMAP server) supported a maximum of 26 user-defined keywords across any one mail folder when using Maildir storage (the most common choice.) The technical basis of that limit (using a-z as indices in filenames) remains, but I don't know if they have worked around it in the past decade. Other IMAP servers using Maildir storage may have similar trouble. If your 25 is actually 26, I would guess that this is the root of your trouble.


GMail has much stranger issues, as they conflate folders and keywords. MS365 and Exchange avoid the problem by not supporting user-defined keywords. I would guess that there are specific quirks in iCloud and Yahoo mail as well, but I'm not familiar with them.

>
> Alain
>
>
> Dear Scott and Benny, thank you for the answers that confirm my worries. I do use Mailmate tags extensively, I currently use about a hundred of them, including 4-5 of the classical custom IMAP keywords. The only other mail client I use is Preside on my iPhone, which is very good but, as you explain for the other clients, cannot “read” the tags.  I also checked Thunderbird recently, but it still does not work.
> Too bad for me.
>
> Alain
>
> On 8 Jun 2024, at 9:27, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:
>
>> On 7 Jun 2024, at 18:06, aisrael wrote:
>>
>>> My understanding, as a non expert in mail clients’ subtleties, is that it is impossible to transfer tags (or smart mailboxes based on tags) from Mailmate to another client (except for a few IMAP keywords). Is it absolutely impossible, or is there a workaround?
>>
>> Scott already gave a thorough answer. I'll just add some random thoughts:
>>
>> * Not all servers support IMAP keywords, in particular, Office365/Exchange. In those cases, MailMate will quietly (which is kind of bad) make them local-only.
>> * Some server have a limit on the number of IMAP keywords which results in various silent errors (like tags getting cleared shortly after being set).
>> * Thunderbird has, I think, 5 custom IMAP keywords. Tags can be created in MailMate which map to those keywords and then they should work nicely together.
>> * Colored flags in Apple Mail also uses IMAP keywords. MailMate mirrors this behavior.
>>
>> -- 
>> Benny
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-- 
Bill Cole