Using Mail.app as a document archive
Maciej Ceglowski decided to use Mail.app 
to archive the early letters of Alexander Pushkin , in part inspired by the Samuel Pepys Blog and in part because email clients offer built-in search and sort features.
It went quite well, but didn’t completely satisfy:
I had to bump the date up by 200 years because Mail.app refuses to properly sort nineteenth century email. I consider this a bug.
He plans to set up an IMAP server to store this kind of information as emails. And he is looking for good sources of material.
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Tags: Apple Mail, archiving, literature, mail.app, pushkin, searching, sorting
July 23rd, 2006 at 11:15 pm
I was actually just trying to figure out how quickly to archive webpages from NetNewsWire into my IMAP folders:
http://board.43folders.com/showthread.php?p=5313#post5313
What would really do the trick is an applescript that could push the front webpage into a selected IMAP folder. As I said in my post, an added bonus would be if the script could let you pick from a list of folders using a pretty MailActOn interface.
July 23rd, 2006 at 11:50 pm
A handy trick if you want to change subject or body of a message is to redirect the message to yourself. (Think of it as a poor man’s MailTags)
When you get a message that needs followup or a new subject line, hit shift command E (redirect), set the to: field to yourself and edit subject and body to your hearts content. The message will arrive coming from the original sender.
The only issue is that the new message will have a later receive date as the original, and the it won’t erase the original.
This could also be good for sending reminders if you integrate it with AppleScript perhaps
July 24th, 2006 at 6:44 am
This is interesting coming on the heels of Mark Pilgrim’s gripes about “losing” his email. What Maciej is actually doing is leveraging imap mailboxes, not necessarily Mail.app.
As noted on this site, while mbox is not a standard, imap is and anyone who is worried about the portability of their mail (like Pushkin would have been) would do well to use a widely-embraced standard, rather than a vendor-specific enhancement of a de facto one.Â
July 24th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
Hah! Well I think it would be fair to say that the Apple Mail team probably did not bugtest mail that’s 200 years old, since Mail wasn’t around then. Nor did they consider it in the scope of their project, either, as I’m sure it’s quite an a-typical use of Mail … a reference for archival documents with the archival document’s true date. Novel, if nothing else, though.
July 24th, 2006 at 11:34 pm
Hehehe… Yes. It does seem to demand rather a lot from the Development Team. :)
But hopefully people have their irony indicators switched on. Although Americans do read this blog from time to time, so perhaps it was rash to post it in that way.