Google Apps Doesn’t Play Nice with MailTags

Friday, December 12, 2008 in Macintosh, Messaging by slowe | 3 comments

One of my most used and most useful applications (add-ons?) is MailTags, by Scott Morrison. It’s an add-on to Mail.app that allows for tagging e-mail messages with keywords, projects, notes, etc., and then saving that information in IMAP headers—if you are so inclined—so that it persists from one IMAP client to another. It’s a fantastic add-on. I highly recommend it.

Unfortunately, I just discovered a strange interaction between MailTags and Google Apps. I recently moved one of my older e-mail domains over to Google Apps and discovered that every time I try to save MailTags data to IMAP, the message(s) disappear from my Inbox. The only way to recover the messages is to login via the web and recover them. The only workaround is to not save MailTags data back to the IMAP server. This is not an issue with MailTags, by the way; this is a strange interaction that results from the odd way in which Google provides IMAP access to mail data.

Had I bothered to do a bit of research before migrating this domain over to Google Apps, I would have found that this was a known issue and is well-documented on the MailTags forums (see here and here, for example). There does not appear to be a timeframe for a workaround, so for the time being I’ll just have to refrain from trying to save MailTags data to IMAP for this particular e-mail account.

Since this is an older domain that isn’t mission-critical, this isn’t a huge worry. Further, since I only use a single IMAP client and typically don’t save a lot of data on the IMAP server, the impact is lessened even more. However, I had been considering moving e-mail for scottlowe.org over to Google Apps as well, and along with that migration I had considered moving more of my e-mail into Google Apps and just use IMAP to keep my client in sync with the server. This would, for example, provide me with greater access to my archived e-mail via my iPhone. With the discovery of this odd behavior, now, I’ll have to reconsider that plan. Anyone have any suggestions?

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  1. Gabe’s avatar

    Gabe on Saturday, December 13, 2008 at 11:11 am

    One of the beautiful things about Google Apps/Gmail is the use of labels. Instead of a folder structure, you can apply multiple labels to an email. I would say just use the webclient the majority of the time and you’ll get the functionality you’re looking for. I see the need for a desktop client in those situations when you’re disconnected, but I use that as a backup and not a primary means of accessing my email, since I’m connected far more often than I’m not.

  2. slowe’s avatar

    slowe on Saturday, December 13, 2008 at 2:34 pm

    And if it were possible to associate MailTags with Gmail labels, that would be fine. But an IMAP client interprets labels as folders, and that’s not what I’m looking to achieve. I do a lot of work offline, so offline access is quite important. Thanks for the suggestion, though!

  3. Mustafa Arif’s avatar

    Mustafa Arif on Monday, January 26, 2009 at 6:01 pm

    The web client simply doesn’t offer the flexibility of a full desktop client. With MailTags I was able to associate a to-do / reminder with an email and have it sync with my calendar on my phone. No chance of doing that with GMail.