In a thread about Postbox being acquired and killed, I said that Apple Mail “feels so limited” and that “I already know I’m not going to be happy with this.” Maybe I’m going to need to make a nice alphabetized meal of that observation.
With SpamSieve my only outside tool for managing 40,000 + messages that had accumulated, mostly unread, over the 10 or so years I used Postbox (which made SpamSieve practically impossible to use in its versions 6 and 7), I’ve managed to get my emails under control, and the stored emails on my @onelane.org server down to 5% of my self-imposed storage limit from 80%.
I’ve used a combination of SpamSieve, Smart Mailboxes, and the Archive Mailbox function to toss most of those messages either into digital oblivion (as far as I’m concerned!) or into archive files.
Close to 70% involved marketing messages, many from companies I’d never done business with, and especially in the past 18 months the blizzard of political pleas for money that I’m sure many U.S. readers also received.
When I resurrected SpamSieve (which involved an inexpensive paid upgrade), my earlier training corpus did not come along on migrations from machine to machine, so it took me a couple of hours to train a new corpus. Everything is being retrieved through IMAP protocol now, because I had desperately wanted to look at email just once on any of my devices and deal with it, just once, on any device.
My desktop iMac is the SS host, which allows (while it’s running) spam to be filtered for every other device. I used to let it run continuously, but no longer have a need to do that, so I followed the SS instructions to set up “drone” mailboxes that use an AppleScript and a rule to accept “good” and “spam” messages on other devices and process them when my iMac is up and running again.
Postbox is a very powerful program, and like most apps I embrace, I probably exploited it close to its limits. But its blind spot was disallowing plug-ins while providing a very anemic “junk” learning capacity. All the good work I could do there was overshadowed by the constant reminder that I had close to 35,000 unread messages.
Meanwhile the Apple Mail interface is much more powerful and useful than it was the last time I used it on MacOS over a decade ago. I have the added bonus that I can see and deal with mail that my server is flagging as junk (and since it’s using Spam Assassin as its junk filter, it’s usually right).
So, I’m munching away, and enjoying the fact that I’ve lifted a huge burden of digital guilt off my shoulders.
), Mozilla closed Thunderbird to plug-ins for security reasons, and so Postbox had to follow suit. One of the reasons I had migrated to Postbox was the plug-ins, and those were just gone. So all it left me was the UI quirks and many, many unprocessed messages.