Alan Gutierrez

In response to my frank comments at the indev.ca forums and my blog post How I Lost My Morning to Tagging and EMail, one Scott Morrison wrote me to assure me that the data was not lost, and asked that I help troubleshoot the problem.

Obviously someone who suffers the delusion that the customer is always right. I subscribe to the Be Nice Or Leave school of customer service. Especially when the customer has yet to pay for anything.

So, rather than be a complete bastard, I zipped up a copy of a sample message, one from the server, one from my MacBook, and sent it on its way. Maybe that will tell him something.

But, what would I do if it was my code? I’d connect to the IMAP server and trace though the code. I really want MailTags to work. I figured, why not just set up an email account for Scott? No better way to reproduce the problem.

I set up an account and sent him a message.

A few hours later, three messages from Scott. The first two zeroing in on the fact that Dovecot stomps the X-Keywords header, where the tags are stored. They are also stored in a JSON string in the X-MailTags header, so the third message had a new MailTags bundle that reads the tags from that header.

After dropping it into place, I rebuild my mailboxes, and my tags reappearedThey were never lost, stored in two separate headers. Apparently, Courier IMAP is not capricious as Dovecot. It doesn’t munge headers the way Dovecot does. Scott’s communications shows that he knows his way around IMAP. Certainly keeping a MailTags specific header for the tags shows foresight. That time spent tagging was not lost.

Now, I’m tagging away again. MailTags is very much a part of my workflow.

That and Mail ActOn, which is another indev.ca addition to Mail.app.

Actually, I’d spent the day despondent wondering what I was going to do without MailTags, now that I’d become accustomed to it.

Update: It is a known issue with Dovecot, as noted in Problem/workaround with X-Keywords and Apple’s Mail.app. I wonder how this is address in Thunderbird, since it seems to always behave correctly, although there is evidence of issues as in 1.0 beta3 not preserving X-Keyword header?.

Update:: I’m now, as of April 14th, 2007, eagerly awaiting Public Beta 10. I’ll be checking the Mail Tags 2.0 site frequently. Public Beta 9 just expired. Scott Morison expires his betas so people are forced to upgrade, which is not a bad idea at all.