The only problem was that the book was printed a few weeks too late to meet the reset deadlines for certain large retail book chains. It’s a gorgeous book, in full color, and includes our trademark free updates-anyone who purchases the printed book is entitled to free downloads of any future editions of the PDF version we produce. Now, after all that tedious splitting, the two pieces have been rejoined into a printed book from Peachpit called Take Control of Apple Mail. It took quite a bit of additional effort, but the final result was a $5, 59-page ebook called Take Control of Spam with Apple Mail and a $10, 89-page ebook called Take Control of Email with Apple Mail. The rest of the material would then be reorganized into a second book. After several false starts, I gave up on splitting the information and just wrote it as one very long document, hoping that a logical way to split the text would emerge after the fact.Īfter a great deal of mulling over that manuscript, Tonya suggested that I could split off the portion about fighting spam (roughly 20 pages) and expand that into its own complete ebook. ![]() But as I started writing, I quickly discovered that the subject matter didn’t lend itself to the kinds of divisions we had come up with. I put those in the project folder, not in the email archive database because I consider them reference material for the project.When I set out to write about Apple’s Mail application for the Take Control series, I had several long discussions with Adam and Tonya Engst about how to divide the material into chunks of the right size, since we generally aim for 50-page ebooks and we clearly had much more than 50 pages worth of content. There is a DEVONthink plugin for MailMate (of course) and I use that regularly to archive specific messages for my projects. Of course, you could just index the MailMate folder and hope that’s enough information to solve whatever future problem you have. This provides the added benefit of creating encrypted backups on Amazon Cloud accounts. Note that a lot this can also be accomplished with Arq for Mac. In that case, just remember that it’s not your email if it’s only ever on someone else’s server. Of course, none of this is a good solution if you only use a web-app or iOS to work with email. I also find the advanced filtering pretty handy for ignoring spam and trash messages during backup. But I never expect my backups to be cleanly organized. The best way I see to manage long term reliable backup is ChronoSync.ĬhronoSync has options for NOT mirroring deletions, which is going to create a big mess over time. 2 Time Machine can be useful but figuring out when messages dissapeared would be a bear of a problem. If you use an application like DEVONthink to periodically import the mail, that can be a real chore. This can get messy though, so think it through carefully. Using a good backup routine means I always have a copy of my messages, even if the host goes away or deletes them. This gives me a nice folder structure that looks like my IMAP collection. If desired this folder can be hidden in the Finder just like the Library folder is hidden by default in OS X. Therefore MailMate offers the slightly mysterious “Custom location” option which can be used to move the Messages folder to a Spotlight searched location. This is because Spotlight ignores files in the application support folder. When enabled you can use Finder (or third party applications like HoudahSpot) to search for emails, but it still won’t work in Spotlight. It takes time and resources to index a large collection of emails and therefore it needs to be optional. It only works if you enable indexing in the General preferences pane. The first thing I recommend if you are a MailMate user is to understand how MailMate stores messages and where. ![]() So that’s where a reliable and redictable backup routine comes in handy. That only works if I use Apple Mail on the Mac, which I hardly ever do anymore. While I’m sure it’s still a wonderful solution, I moved my mail backup to DEVONthink awhile back because I liked the search options better. In the past I used the excellent MailSteward for Mac. Without a good backup and a way to find the missing messages in the backup, my life would be a lot more difficult. With IMAP sync, everything would be gone on every connected device. I make the extra effort to organize my email archive because it improves my search experience, but even if I just moved everything to an archive folder my email is a data collection I count on.īut what if my email host went away. With unbelievably inexpensive storage options and incredible search and filtering my email is now a filing cabinet. Email is more than just a communication tool for me.
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