macblaze.ca

As I haven’t been posting a lot of interesting content over the last few years and since I have been automatically  uploading my tweets on a weekly basis, it has kind of made the blog look kinda unappealing. So I decided to block all the Tweeting reposts from the main feed. You can still find them all here: https://macblaze.ca/?cat=9  or in the menu under Categories and they will continue to accumulate in the background.

Hopefully the blog will now look a little bit more like a blog.

Here’s a cat pic to seal the deal.

Why?

Mostly because I don’t like other entities controlling my content. So I repost all my twitter and instagram posts on my own server. At some point I intend to do the same thing for Facebook but it isn’t as easy do to their security etc. I do however download all my content from Facebook and store a copy in my own archives. Paranoid? No, but I do like to be in control 🙂

Further to my previous post about Apple Mail Issue I have been having issues on my new mac with threading conversations. Normally this isn’t much of an issue but I subscribe to the Standard Ebooks Google Group because that is what they use to track projects and keeping the various projects grouped together is pretty important.

Normally what one does is create a rule on the server (iCloud, your webmail etc.) and the  server will automatically sort the mail before it gets to your desktop or phone. For example I have all mu linked in emails go straight into a LinkedIn folder or anything related to ebooks purchased routed to an Ebook folder. This means they don’t bing my phone and aren’t sitting in my inbox and I can check them later at my leisure. But for some reason Google had to be different. For the longest time I had the rule on my laptop which was always on and it would sort the gmail emails and then synch that back up to the cloud—a bit of a hack but I couldn’t be bother to try and figure out what Gmail was doing. But the new mini  goes into a deeper sleep and doesn’t sort—so I decided to figure out the actual correct solution.

I will save all my the swearing at Google. Suffice it to say that against all conventions, Gmail does not use simple folders but has this weird-assed system of labels and a given email can exist in the inbox and in the label at the same time—which is exactly what I didn’t want.

To Fix it

Go to mail.google.com and sign in to you account

Go to  Settings (the gear in the upper left)

Click See all settings

Go to/Click Labels

Click Create new label
be sure (show in IMAP) is checked

Then go to Filters and blocked addresses

Click Create a new filter

Add your criteria. I wanted all emails from standardebooks@googlegroups.com to move to a new folder so I selected From: and entered that address; but I could have selected Subject: etc. to filter by whatever made sense…

Click Create filter

Check Skip the Inbox (Archive it)
and
Check Apply the label: Whatever you chose in the step above

Then Click Create Filter

This will “archive the email — basically removing it from the inbox without marking it as read — and then label it with which ever “folder” you want it to appear in. Then by the time you desktop or phone synchs with the server the email will be moved and not appear in your inbox.

SOOO convoluted. As an aside I find most of what Google apps (gmail, sheets, etc.) do is to make a simple thing more complicated rather than a complicated thing more simple. But then again I prefer a computer does what I tell it to rather than what some anonymous programmer decides is simplest, so maybe it’s just me.

Update to Apple Mail Issue

In Apple Mail Issue I had talked about sorting conversations and threading correctly and frankly rebuilding the mailboxes only worked for a while. Now I have deleted the gmail account entirely and added it back as an IMAP account rather than using Apple & Google’s “secure method.” This entails changing the security setting to allow “less secure apps” and manually adding the IMAP account. So far so good, but we will have to wait and see if this works any better.

For future reference…

I was having an issue in which emails in a thread were not displaying the correct contents. This was happening primarily with my gmail IMAP account from the Standards Ebook mailing list which made it particularly frustrating.

I tried deleting and or rebuilding the mailboxes and even deleted the whole gmail mailbox (~/Library/Mail/v7/AFD4138D-113E-4798-BA9B-A928C0A9EC44/) all to no avail.

Finally I came across this Mail shows wrong message body (finding the right term to Google makes it so much easier…)

The Solution:

• Quit mail.
• Go to ~/Library/Mail/v7/MailData/
• Delete
  Envelope Index
  ExternalUpdates.storedata
  and any variants
• Restart Mail and let it rebuild (this will take some time).

So far this seems to be working…