As I mentioned earlier I moved this website as well as all development over to (mt). I am currently exploring how to migrate all of my email over(currently all addresses forward to my gmail account which I download via POP3). (mt) offered IMAP and I would really like to make the final plunge. I read a few things about server side filtering rules with IMAP so email is already sorted into the proper folders no matter which computer I access my account from. I couldn’t find any information on how to set these up or if (mt) even supports them. The support guy said they didn’t but he also didn’t sound like he knew what I was talking about.
Currently I use MailTags to tag each of my emails with Mail.app rules and sort them into smart folders according to thier tags(setup just like gmail) and all old emails moved a single Archives folder. This has worked up until now but does not seem very practical for long term use and archiving. I have been searching around for a better solution and have found a few ideas but have not found that one thing that just makes sense to me. If anyone can help me out with this I would be so incredibly greatful. After 10 years on the internet I want to finally get my email sorted and organized again like I had using mutt on Gentoo back in the day(before switching ;-)).
The standard way to do this is to use the Sieve Mail Filtering Language (RFC 3028) and use IMAP keywords to tag mail messages. See http://sieve.info/ for details about Sieve. There are a number of mail service provicers that support server-side Sieve scripting. Two that I like are Tuffmail.com and FastMail.FM, but there are others. I do not think that (mt) supports Sieve, unfortunately.
So if I went with (mt) for me IMAP email, and went without server side filtering. Assuming I have the same mail rules setup in each mail client I used, when I logged in with that client and got new mail, the rules would filter them out and then move them into a different folder on the IMAP server, so when I used my next client they would still be moved right?
If your local email client can filter messages into server-side IMAP-accessible mailboxes and if it uses the IMAP protocol to do this, then you should be OK. But, it makes more sense to do the filtering as the messages arrive at the server, so I would advise finding an IMAP service provider that offers server-side filtering via Sieve or Procmail (which you say in another post that you have experience with). Good luck with IMAP!
Hi
There are a number of products that have or are developing support for MailTags.
Might I suggest MailSteward or Eagle Filer or Devon Think.
For a massive amount of Mail, MailSteward may be the best.
Scott
(developer of MailTags)