[smitty825]

As was posted here on these forums (and elsewhere), the people at Qualcomm announced that Eudora was no longer being actively developed, but instead they are creating a new application based on the Thunderbird code. I had been using Eudora since 1996, when I "graduated" from AOL (and eWorld!) to the real internet....

Since Eudora has been stagnating for a long time, I had been looking for an application to move my emails to, and it seems that Mail.app is a good choice for me. (Mainly because I've already paid for it with my purchase of Tiger, and I know it will be kept somewhat up to date)

The first thing that I did was move all of my old email and filters from Eudora over to Mail.app, using Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. Once I did that, I set up all of my accounts on Mail, and was able to connect fine and download any new email I had received. (There are some things I like about Mail.app, and a few things that I miss from Eudora, but that's another story)

Anyway, in doing this, I have some questions about Mail.app that maybe some people can help me answer. I did a quick search on this forum, and I've looked on Apple's webpage, but I haven't found the answer yet...

1. When using Eudora, I accessed all of my mailboxes via POP3. However, I decided to use IMAP on my Mail.app setup. I found the setting to allow me to download all messages to my laptop, but in the process, it has also uploaded all of the emails that I have sent & received since 1996 up to my server. While it is pretty cool to access emails from 1996 via my webmail, I do have a limited amount of space on the server. So, is it possible to setup Mail to download all of my mail via IMAP, but have it leave only the last 2 weeks of messages on the server?

2. When I select the option to save sent mail on the server, Mail.app uploads all of my sent messages to the server. Once again, this is really cool, but it seems that these sent messages are no longer stored on my local machine, which means I can't access them without an internet connection, and I can't easily back up these items. Is this possible to setup Mail.app such that messages are both stored locally and on my server?

3. One cool thing about Eudora is that it had a "statistics" window. It told you things like how many emails you sent & received in a month, what percentage received was spam, what percentage of spam wasn't caught, etc. Since I ran my own server, I was able to test things like "greylisting" to see how effective they were. Is anything like this available for Mail?

Sorry for the long post! I would appreciate any other tips that may make this conversion to Mail.app go smoothly!

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by smitty825 

1. When using Eudora, I accessed all of my mailboxes via POP3. However, I decided to use IMAP on my Mail.app setup. I found the setting to allow me to download all messages to my laptop, but in the process, it has also uploaded all of the emails that I have sent & received since 1996 up to my server. While it is pretty cool to access emails from 1996 via my webmail, I do have a limited amount of space on the server. So, is it possible to setup Mail to download all of my mail via IMAP, but have it leave only the last 2 weeks of messages on the server?

You could create a mail rule that will transfer mail older than x days to a local mail folder in OS X Mail.

2. When I select the option to save sent mail on the server, Mail.app uploads all of my sent messages to the server. Once again, this is really cool, but it seems that these sent messages are no longer stored on my local machine, which means I can't access them without an internet connection, and I can't easily back up these items. Is this possible to setup Mail.app such that messages are both stored locally and on my server?

By default, OS X Mail should cache a local copy for offline viewing.

3. One cool thing about Eudora is that it had a "statistics" window. It told you things like how many emails you sent & received in a month, what percentage received was spam, what percentage of spam wasn't caught, etc. Since I ran my own server, I was able to test things like "greylisting" to see how effective they were. Is anything like this available for Mail?

No, Mail is a very basic email client, probably lacking some features of more powerful email clients. If you want this sort of flexibility, you ought to check out Thunderbird and the numerous extensions available for it.

[smitty825]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

You could create a mail rule that will transfer mail older than x days to a local mail folder in OS X Mail.

Cool! That worked great getting the email off of my server, and into my Mac! Do you know if it is possible to do this on mailboxes other than the "Inbox"? I'd like to do the same thing with the sent mail!

Thanks again for your help!

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by smitty825 

Cool! That worked great getting the email off of my server, and into my Mac! Do you know if it is possible to do this on mailboxes other than the "Inbox"? I'd like to do the same thing with the sent mail!

Thanks again for your help!

Doesn't look like it... Sounds like you are running into some of the limitations of the design of OS X Mail. Really, you have a very specific workflow from the sounds of things, I really suggest checking out Thunderbird. It is far more flexible, works just fine with extremely large mailboxes. Colleagues of mine have literally decades of mail archived that they access with Thunderbird just fine.

[smitty825]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Doesn't look like it... Sounds like you are running into some of the limitations of the design of OS X Mail. Really, you have a very specific workflow from the sounds of things, I really suggest checking out Thunderbird. It is far more flexible, works just fine with extremely large mailboxes. Colleagues of mine have literally decades of mail archived that they access with Thunderbird just fine.

Thanks for the Thunderbird suggestion. I did take a serious look at it before deciding on Apple Mail, but decided against using it for several reasons. (The biggest being lack of integration with the Apple Addressbook, but also knowing that Mail will continue to track advances Apple makes to their OS.)

It really seems to me that Apple got quite a bit right with Mail.app. There are just a few things that I would really like to see...such as a more powerful rule engine!

[zro]

Mail is nice, but lacking. I notice it creates a folder named "Sent messages" instead of syncing with the servers sent box on my IMAP server when I have the store sent messages option enabled. Same with deleted messages. This behavior has been a point of confusion for me.

Also no encoding preference for outgoing e-mail.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by zro 

Mail is nice, but lacking. I notice it creates a folder named "Sent messages" instead of syncing with the servers sent box on my IMAP server when I have the store sent messages option enabled. Same with deleted messages. This behavior has been a point of confusion for me.

Also no encoding preference for outgoing e-mail.

You can designate a new sent folder by selecting the folder and going to Mailbox -> Use this Mailbox for...


What do you mean by encoding prefs? MIME encoding, or PGP, S/MIME encryption/signing prefs?

[zro]

Text encoding.

[JKT]

Not sure what you mean, but have you looked at this menu option?

[zro]

Yes, but unlike, say Thunderbird, there's no default setting.