[MlMt] tags and email client

[aisrael]

Dear Bill, thanks for the input. Your maximum of 26 might be the 
explanation. In fact, beside my 26 Mailmate tags, I see in Preside a 
bunch of additional tags/keywords that start with $ ($Junk, 
$MDNSent,…), which I guess are “universal” keywords. The question 
is : how are these 26 selected (not the most recent, not the oldest, not 
the first or last by alphabetical order), and am I allowed to decide 
which 26 are accessible (I guess not).
In addition, as my server uses Exchange, I am even more surprised that 
it works, even if only partially.

Alain



On 8 Jun 2024, at 17:45, Bill Cole wrote:

> 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
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