GNUMail.app User's Guide
by Martin Brecher <martin@mb-itconsulting.com>
- Contents
- Managing Mailboxes
- The Mailboxes window
- Opening mailboxes
- Moving messages
- Creation of mailboxes
- Removal of mailboxes
- Renaming mailboxes
- Advanced lection: Moving/copying mailboxes
Usually all your received mail gets stored in the local Inbox mailbox which GNUMail.app opens
on startup by default. But over some time, when having a huge amount
of messages, the ability to sort all your mail into different folders gets important. And as you
might have already expected, with GNUMail.app that's as easy as managing
your email contacts using the Address book as explained above.
You can reach the Mailboxes window by using the menu ('Mailbox' -> 'Mailboxes'), by clicking
the Mailboxes button in a mailbox window (i.e. the Inbox window) or
invoking the keyboard shortcut with CTRL+ALT+M.
The Mailboxes window mainly consists of five buttons on the top and a browser list where all local
mailboxes and remote IMAP folders (if IMAP servers are specified in the
preferences) are displayed. Additionally there is a 'Close' button on the bottom of the window to close
the Mailboxes panel.
(Click the image for a full size view)
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You can open a mailbox by double clicking its name in the list or by selecting it from
the list (using a single click)
and pressing the first button which has the envelope on it. |
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You can move messsages between mailboxes by exercising these steps: 1. select one or multiple
messages in a mailbox window (i.e. Inbox), then
2. select the target mailbox from the mailboxes list (using one click) and 3. click the button
with the arrow on it to finally move the messages. |
Creating new mailboxes is very easy: Clicking the button with the plus on it will bring up a
small panel where you can enter the name of your new mailbox.
Then click 'OK' to finally create the mailbox or 'Cancel' to close the panel without creating a
new mailbox.
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Add button |
Mailbox creation panel |
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Again, removing mailboxes is as simple as adding new ones. Select the mailbox you want to
remove and click the button with the minus on it.
Removal of mailboxes will be confirmed as seen below: |
(Click the image for a full size view)
GNUMail.app now allows you to rename mailboxes using the user interface.
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This is done by selecting
a mailbox from the mailbox list and clicking the button with the three dots on it. A little dialog will
popup and ask you for the new mailbox name. |
Advanced lection: Moving/copying mailboxes [top of page] |
As you may already know, GNUMail.app usually stores its local mailboxes in the ~/gnumail folder. When viewing the
contents of that directory you will see that every mailbox is a common file on its own which
contains the messages. So if you want to create a backup of your Inbox mailbox you can simply copy it to another
location.
For example, you may like to move your Inbox mailbox to Inbox.<date> if it gets too big (the bigger
it gets the longer it takes GNUMail.app to list the messages). You
can simply do this by executing mv Inbox Inbox.`date +%y-%%m-%d`. That will move the Inbox
file to e.g. Inbox.01-02-03 where 01 is the year, 02 the month (Feb) and 01 the day. Next, you should create
a new, empty Inbox file by typing touch Inbox.
You can also automate this procedure using cron. The size of the Inbox file can be retrieved using
du ~/gnumail/Inbox. (The given size is in kilobytes.)
As always, you should backup your data first before playing around with the files... don't blame me :-)
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