On 25 Aug 2015, at 13:03, Brian Scholl wrote:
Also, a more theoretical postscript: It seems to me that Benny's
reluctance
to pursue any sort of .mbox export or local folder option stems from
the
notion that such things are intrinsically in opposition to the entire
notion/purpose of IMAP. For example, in one of the ticket replies
about
such things once upon a time, he wrote: "MailMate really is IMAP only
and I
don't have any current plans to change that. Essentially (if you think
about it), 'On My Mac' support is the same as supporting POP3.
Messages are
only temporarily stored on the server."
I do like being quoted :-)
That doesn't seem right to me. Embracing the IMAP worldview but then
also
limiting the size and complexity of online accounts by periodically
allowing them to be culled to local-only long-term-storage archives
doesn't
feel the same to me as just using POP3 in a different way.
Conversely, it
seems like allowing for a local .mbox export (or something like that)
in MM
wouldn't be some sort of betrayal of its underlying nature. Rather,
it
would just be a way for users to adapt true day-to-day IMAP usage to a
longer-term archiving practice.
POP3 has often been used in a way where fetched messages are not deleted
immediately, but instead deleted on the server after a certain number of
days. This allows multiple clients to fetch the emails before they
disappear. This is what I mean with “temporary storage”. Granted,
IMAP+local is better than POP3, but that was not my point. My point was
that MailMate is an IMAP client and specifically *not* a POP3 client.
Local messages would essentially allow MailMate to be used as a POP3
client and I'd really prefer if users did not do that.
I'm not saying that *you* do not have good reasons to want local storage
(or POP3), but I don't believe the majority of users need it -- in fact
I think it should be discouraged. MailMate is very flexible and you can
get POP3 like behavior if you really insist (as described in my other
email), but I'm unlikely to ever make it a straightforward feature.
(A concrete example: I teach classes at a university, and during each
semester I will accrete huge online IMAP folders with emails relating
to
those classes. But then once the relevant semester has finished, I
just
hate the idea of keeping those folders online forever. Even just the
sheer
*number* of such folders would become awkward and distracting over
time,
not to mention the messages they contain. But I also don't just want
to
delete those messages forever -- since maybe once per year I'll have a
need
to dive into a previous semester's folders to find something. So this
is
practice some sort of betrayal of how I'm supposed to use IMAP?)
If you have webmail then I would probably do it the other way round. I
would use “Edit Subscriptions” in the IMAP account editor in
MailMate to unsubscribe the mailbox. That would leave the messages on
the IMAP server only and if needed they can be searched via webmail (or
even subscribed again if needed a lot). This would also save local disk
space.
Do others feel similarly? Am I just thinking about this the wrong
way?
You are certainly not alone, but some changes are hard. I've been in
numerous POP3 vs IMAP discussions over the years, but now it seems that
POP3 is rarely mentioned. Instead the (very similar) need for local
messages comes up quite often. The best argument for that is privacy,
but (some day) I would like to solve that problem in a different way
(encryption).
I hope that clarifies my point of view.
--
Benny
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