Welcome to mail-vault-app Discussions! #1
Replies: 16 comments 28 replies
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I'm very interested in using MailVault to archive my nearly 20 GB of gmail data, but I see in the FAQs that the data is stored in a subfolder of ~Library/Application Support. I have only 100 GB free on my boot drive and was hoping to store the data on an attached drive. Is it possible to move the storage location? Thanks. |
Hello, it is possible to change the backup location. Settings -> Backup and restore -> External Backup Location |
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Thanks! |
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So I set up the external drive in the settings and it worked to a degree. I have 43,000 gmails taking up about 13GB on Gmail. After changing the location for storage and after almost a week, I'd downloaded 15GB and 60,000 emails. BUT a number of my subdirectories were not carried over (I have 59 total). So I went into the app and went through each subdirectory, asking it to archive everything in each directory. Now I have 22 GB on my boot drive in '/Users/Artiste212/Library/Containers/com.mailvault.app/Data/Library/Application Support/com.mailvault.app' . com.mailvault.app is listed as an application, but contains 22 gb of emails. And I still haven't downloaded all my Gmail. If there's something I'm doing wrong, I'm happy to restart the process. But I'm concerned that I haven't been able to reliably download what I need in over a week. I'd love to hear what you suggest. |
You can open the app settings -> Backup & restore -> Verify backup coverage.
The verification displays the folder contents and the counts of emails downloaded as well as server counts.. Server: email count on server in the folder. As far as I remember, there are limits for how much you can download per day for Gmail: https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/gmail/gmail-bandwidth-limits?sjid=17824264869670468437-EU&visit_id=639213872901082641-1055016639&rd=1 Please let me know if this is helpful. If not, maybe you can share some anonymous screenshots to better understand directory-subdirectory structure you have? Or maybe you see the pattern of what is missing and could point me in the right direction. Or anything else that you feel could help solve the issue. |
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So I set up the external drive in the settings and it worked to a degree. I have 43,000 gmails taking up about 13GB on Gmail. After changing the location for storage and after almost a week, I'd downloaded 15GB and 60,000 emails. BUT a number of my subdirectories were not carried over (I have 59 total). So I went into the app and went through each subdirectory, asking it to archive everything in each directory. Now I have 22 GB on my boot drive in '/Users/Artiste212/Library/Containers/com.mailvault.app/Data/Library/Application Support/com.mailvault.app' . com.mailvault.app is listed as an application, but contains 22 gb of emails. And I still haven't downloaded all my Gmail. If there's something I'm doing wrong, I'm happy to restart the process. But I'm concerned that I haven't been able to reliably download what I need in over a week. I'd love to hear what you suggest. |
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Hi Rokas,
Thanks for getting back to me. It looks like I am hitting the daily limits.
Also, I understand that the external drive is only a backup location. Unfortunately, this won’t work for me because I have only 100 GB free on my boot drive and Mailvault is already above 22 GB inside my Library folder. I’ll need to find a solution that works with all the .eml files on the external drive.
Lastly, I do not see the Backup Verification you see in app settings -> Backup & restore. These two screenshots are what I see. BTW, I’m using Version 2.8.0 (2.8.0).
 
Bruce
Bruce
… On Aug 3, 2026, at 5:02 PM, Rokas Ambrazevicius ***@***.***> wrote:
Screenshot.2026-08-03.at.23.50.54.png (view on web) <https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/721c08c1-152a-4bb5-a4e6-f4c1f83c718a> You can open the app settings -> Backup & restore -> Verify backup coverage.
The verification displays the folder contents and the counts of emails downloaded as well as server counts..
Server: email count on server in the folder.
App: '/Users/Artiste212/Library/Containers/com.mailvault.app/Data/Library/Application Support/com.mailvault.app' emails in this location, used by app. App backup,
Ext: External backup location from Backup settings, this is a second copy.
As far as I remember, there are limits for how much you can download per day for Gmail: https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/gmail/gmail-bandwidth-limits?sjid=17824264869670468437-EU&visit_id=639213872901082641-1055016639&rd=1
I have a feeling, you might be hitting a limit...
Please let me know if this is helpful. If not, maybe you can share some anonymous screenshots to better understand directory-subdirectory structure you have? Or maybe you see the pattern of what is missing and could point me in the right direction. Or anything else that you feel could help solve the issue.
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Hey, I have your back. Version 2.9.0 released. You are now able to change the Let me know how it goes 🤞 |
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Hi Rokas,
Thanks for this. Mailvaut moved all my large data folders as promised. Most of my folders seem to be completely backed up, although I may have just hit the Gmail limit on one of them with 6834 emails. I’ll wait for that one.
There is one small error I noticed (but doesn’t seem to affect anything): the file ~user/library/containers/com.gmail.app is probably not an app, but a folder. It doesn’t seem to cause any issues, though.
Appreciate the work you put into this and I’ll let you know if I notice anything else.
Best,
Bruce
… On Aug 4, 2026, at 5:05 AM, Rokas Ambrazevicius ***@***.***> wrote:
Hey,
I have your back. Version 2.9.0 released.
You are now able to change the Application support directory to any other directory and let the app serve content from selected directory as well as migrate content.
Screenshot.2026-08-04.at.10.44.26.png (view on web) <https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/7d53aabe-2878-4ce6-bac5-59a31d25fad6>
Choose the Move mail to another folder option. It will copy the existing content to new directory, verify and delete.
Let me know how it goes 🤞
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Hey Bruce, Happy to help and happy you made progress. I believe that the email should always be yours. The Thanks for kind words, this means a lot. 🙇 |
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Hi Rokas, I’ve been been using MailVault on and off for a little over a month, and have discovered another possible “edge case” issue you might be interested in looking into. For the first time since I installed MailVault, I’m now able to create complete backups of my 43,000 email Gmail account by using a workaround for this issue. I’ve also been following the very good, helpful answers you’ve been giving another user, and they got me thinking. I then read your description online of how you test MailVault, and believe my situation created an issue that hasn’t yet been fully tested. To summarize, I have 43,000 emails in about 30 or more folders and subfolders in Gmail. I noticed that downloading emails proceeds at a rate of 1,500 - 2,000 per hour. Although I have more than enough internet connectivity, this seems right for Gmail. It isn't a MailVault issue. About a month ago, you updated MallVault at my request to move all my data folders to an external drive. Clearly, it’s not as fast as my internal drive, even though it checks out fine with Disk Utility and there have been no read-write errors. Nevertheless, MailVault would lock up without an explicit error message after 60 - 90 minutes. I have other programs that write large amounts of data to this disk, including one that downloads my photos from iCloud in full form and another that downloads all my iCloud program data. Both of these programs work fine while using my M1 Mini for other tasks. I was not running these while MailVault was running. MailVault does not use too much memory, and memory pressure remains good all the time during its use. So what was the problem? I realized that Time Machine was backing up certain directories on this external drive hourly. When it is is doing so, Time Machine backups are slower and I assume MailVault is also slower in writing its data. I should have excluded the MailVault data folders from Time Machine backups, but didn't think to do so back then. Ongoing Time Machine backups don’t interfere with the operations of other programs I use, even those that use this external drive, but it seems that the latency or slow speed of writing data to my external drive became too long for MailVault. It froze every single time without an error message. I was never able to get past the first 2,000 or 3,000 emails before this would happen. I’d have to restart MailVault, but going over the same folder would stop at about the same time again and again. I realize now that trying to backup data (the entire email database is about 20 GB) while it is being written is an edge case. It was never a memory issue, but a disk issue. Time Machine backups are now turned off while using MailVault. The MailVault data has been moved once more, this time to inside a folder that is excluded from Time Machine backups. It would be helpful if MailVault could either put up a useful error message or exit in a graceful manner when this sort of problem occurs. TLDR - using an external drive can be great when the internal drive has too little space, but it’s necessary to prevent Time Machine from accessing this data while MailVault is running. An error message would make discovering this issue much easier. Is more error tolerance even possible? Thanks very much for your persistence in debugging and improving MailVault. Even though your most recent online replies weren’t directly related to my issues, reading your emails showed your dedication to improving this app. They were the reason I kept looking into this issue until it was resolved. Bruce |
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Hello. Thank you for this useful program. I made a complete backup of my email mailbox. It is not as large as it is on the server, which makes me feel a bit uncertain. Also, I searched in the desktop app, found emails, but I cannot open them. Error message: Failed to load email (UID 34, INBOX.Archive.Projekt Nystart.Lieferanten. CRM Centralstation): Message UID 34 is no longer in INBOX.Archive. Projekt Nystart. Lieferanten.CRM Centralstation I would be grateful for an explanation of this error and how to fix it. Thank you very much. 2026-09-03 Removed Picture |
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Hello bson73, Thanks for the detailed report - that error was ours, not your server's. The clue is the folder name in the message: INBOX.Archive.Projekt Nystart.Lieferanten.CRM Centralstation is the folder selected in your sidebar, not the folder the message you clicked lives in. Search looks across all your folders, but the results were not carrying a record of which folder each hit came from, so opening one went looking in whichever folder happened to be selected. A message number is only unique within one folder, so it either found nothing - the error you saw - or, worse, found a different message with the same number and showed you that one instead. Fixed; it will be in the next release. If you want to confirm in the meantime: click the folder the message actually lives in first, then open it - that path was never affected. On the size difference: that is separate and worth checking properly. Settings → Backup & restore → Verify backup coverage lists every folder with the server's count next to the count MailVault has, which will tell us whether anything is genuinely missing or whether it is still working through your 59 folders. If any row is short, send me a screenshot and I will look at it. Fix incoming, ETA ~2-3 hours, maybe quicker. Will drop a message here once the fix is live. |
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Thank you so much for the super-fast reply. I'm blown away! I'm looking forward to the fix and I've found one more thing. When you click on help > mailvault Website, it takes you to mailvault.app - the site is offline. See screenshots.
Thank you so much!
… Am 2026-08-25 um 19:01 schrieb Rokas Ambrazevicius ***@***.***>:
Hello bson73,
Thanks for the detailed report - that error was ours, not your server's.
The clue is the folder name in the message: INBOX.Archive.Projekt Nystart.Lieferanten.CRM Centralstation is the folder selected in your sidebar, not the folder the message you clicked lives in. Search looks across all your folders, but the results were not carrying a record of which folder each hit came from, so opening one went looking in whichever folder happened to be selected. A message number is only unique within one folder, so it either found nothing - the error you saw - or, worse, found a different message with the same number and showed you that one instead.
Fixed; it will be in the next release. If you want to confirm in the meantime: click the folder the message actually lives in first, then open it - that path was never affected.
On the size difference: that is separate and worth checking properly. Settings → Backup & restore → Verify backup coverage lists every folder with the server's count next to the count MailVault has, which will tell us whether anything is genuinely missing or whether it is still working through your 59 folders. If any row is short, send me a screenshot and I will look at it.
Fix incoming, ETA ~2-3 hours, maybe quicker. Will drop a message here once the fix is live.
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Will fix this one as well 👍 Thank you again 🙏 |
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Thank you very much. If I may ask silly questions, I have another one. I live in Europe, more precisely in Sweden, and here we have funny special characters like öäüå – these are also in my folder names. The program changes "Bokelmühle" to "Bokelmu&Awg-hle," and this happens everywhere in the folders. I'm worried about data recovery. So, my question is, is there a better way to do this? 2026-09-03 Removed Pictures |
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Let me see what can be done about this, localisations and the challenges they bring are always fun. |
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Hey bson73, v2.10.2 is live - everything you reported is in it:
The app should offer the update itself; otherwise it's on the releases page. Would you check whether that clears all of it on your side? And the size difference still bugs me - if you open Settings → Backup & restore → Verify backup coverage and any folder shows fewer than the server count, send me that screenshot and I'll chase it. Thanks for reporting all four in one evening. That's the useful kind of bug report. 🙏 |
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Hello! Thank you so much for the super-fast support! I'm absolutely thrilled. All the errors have been verified and fixed, and the backup checks are showing 100%, with all the numbers matching. Everything seems to be working perfectly. Thank you so much! I'll continue using and testing it and wish you continued success! Thanks again! 
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Thanks again for reporting and super happy we solved all the reported issues 🙇♂️ |
MailVault 2.11.0 — nine languages, a first run that explains itself, and Premium in one placeClosing a loop from earlier in this thread: @bson73 asked in August about folder names with ä/ö/ü, and I mentioned that localising the app to the big eight was on the roadmap. It has shipped. Nine languages, switched while you watchEnglish · Español · Français · Italiano · Deutsch · Português (Brasil) · 日本語 · 한국어 · 简体中文 The whole app, not just the surface: every screen and button, the menu bar and the tray menu, the notifications it sends, and the errors it reports when a mail server refuses something. Dates, times and numbers follow the language you picked rather than the one your computer happens to be set to — which matters if you read English mail on a German Mac, or the other way round. Pick one in Settings → Language and it changes as you watch. Nothing to restart, nothing to reinstall. The translations ship inside the app, so choosing one tells nobody anything — none of this touches the network. mailvaultapp.com is translated too — every page, in all nine — with screenshots taken in each language rather than English pictures under translated captions. The pictures inside the app are localised the same way: The first launch now explains itselfA new install used to land on an empty mailbox list with an Add Account button and no explanation — a poor first impression for an app whose whole point is that your mail stops living on someone else's computer. It is now a short tour, and the first thing it asks is which language to use. Asked, not guessed from the machine: the language your computer is set to is often not the language you read mail in. Then it says what MailVault does with a mailbox and where the password goes — into the system keychain, not into a file the app writes — and asks how the app should look, with a real message list beside the choice that changes as you pick: The last two screens say what is free forever — the local vault, chat view, search across every folder, link and sender warnings — and what a subscription adds. Both can be reopened any time from Settings → Help, so you never have to replay the tour to find them again. There is also an "I'll do this later" for anyone without their server details to hand, and while you read, the first mailbox is already syncing in the background. Premium now says what it buysSettings → Billing used to quote a price against nothing at all: the features it pays for were described on five separate locked panels scattered through the app. Every Premium feature is now listed in one place, each with a picture and a link straight to the screen it lives on. Two of those features are new in 2.11.0. Tracker removal. Most marketing mail carries a hidden image — usually a single transparent pixel — that your mail program fetches from the sender's server the moment the message opens. That one fetch reports back that you read it, at what minute, how many times you came back, roughly where you were and what you read it on. Every message MailVault opens is now checked, and a small eye appears beside the subject; click it and MailVault names the company doing the tracking and shows the exact address the pixel would have called. That much is free, for everyone, forever. With a subscription MailVault also takes the beacon out before the message is drawn, so nothing is ever requested and the sender is told nothing at all. 498 known tracking addresses ship with the app — merged from MailTrackerBlocker and Ugly Email and extended with senders newer than both, bundled rather than fetched, because an app that asks a server which pixels to block has replaced one tracker with another. Export a message as a picture or a web page. Mail is the one archive most people cannot hand to anyone else: forwarding changes the headers, a screenshot cuts off at the window edge, and printing to PDF renders whatever the print stylesheet felt like. MailVault now exports a message, or a whole conversation, as a PNG of exactly what you were reading — or as one self-contained HTML file that folds each message behind its date and sender. Remote images are fetched once, during the export, and written into the file, so it still reads years later with the network unplugged. Scripts, frames and handlers are stripped before the bytes are written, and every file records which account and folder it came from, how many remote images were mirrored in, how many the sender's server refused, and how many tracking pixels were dropped rather than fetched. Without a subscription the same button renders three samples on the spot, with the same code, so you can see the output before deciding. Premium is $4/month or $25/year, with a 14-day trial on the yearly plan. Everything not marked Premium is free and stays free. Also in this release
Full notes: https://github.com/GraphicMeat/mail-vault-app/releases/tag/v2.11.0 If something reads wrong in your language — a clipped button, an awkward sentence, a string still in English — reply here with a screenshot. Translations are the easiest thing to fix and the easiest to get subtly wrong, and eight of the nine are not my native language either. |
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Looks great! 🤩 Thanx! |
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Feature Request: Hierarchical Folder View Instead of Alphabetical Sorting Hi, Upfront: I'm genuinely impressed with how the app is shaping up – really great work! There's one thing I noticed that I'd like to submit as a feature request: Currently, all mailboxes/folders are displayed sorted alphabetically only. On my server, however, I have deeply nested folder structures, sometimes up to 5 levels deep, like this: Level 1 > Level 2 > Level 3 > Level 4 > Level 5 The lowest level is very often simply named "Done", since that's where completed items get filed. In the alphabetical view, this means I suddenly end up with 10 or more folders all named "Done", with no visible connection to their parent folder. The actual structure is completely lost. My request: it would be great to have a view (either as an option, or even as the default) that displays folders nested the way they're set up on the server – i.e. as a tree structure instead of a flat alphabetical list. This matters to me because this app is meant to replace my daily mail client (currently Apple Mail), and for that I rely on the folder structure. It's especially important in the archive – the structure tells us exactly where something was filed, which lets us narrow down search much more effectively. Without the hierarchy, that advantage is lost. Thanks for listening, and for the work you're putting into the app – I'd really appreciate it if you could consider this! Best regards bson73 2026-09-03 Removed Picture. :) |
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Hey, thanks for the kind words. Let's aim for the best mail client out there, so let me see what can be done about this. Rough ETA: 2-4 days. |
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Short update: Made some good progress, polishing the app a lot. Don't like the tag cloud display at the moment. Improving the tag cloud and we will have a release with nested folders, probably in the next 24 hours. 
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Hey @bson73, v2.11.1 is out - nested folders shipped. The sidebar draws the tree your server sends. A folder with folders inside it carries a chevron, and MailVault remembers which ones you left open, for each account separately. Your ten "Done" folders now each sit under their own parent instead of ten identical rows. Opening a parent lists the whole branch - every message in it and in everything beneath it, newest first, filling in folder by folder rather than all at once. A parent that only exists to hold other folders is no longer an empty list. Move to folder shows the same tree, and the Tag Cloud sidebar style nests too. Five levels deep with a "Done" at the bottom was the shape I built and tested against, so yours is the structure I most want to hear about. Could you update and put it through a normal day of work? If anything reads wrong - a chevron where it should not be, a branch slow to fill, a folder that will not open, anything you would have done differently in Apple Mail — reply here with a screenshot and I will fix it. Thanks again for the request. It made the app better. |
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Thank you! I'm really impressed! I haven't discovered any "error" in the folders yet. I'll work with it and report back. Thank you again for the super fast implementation. Have a nice time! |
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Hello again. The program is actually much better than I expected. A search window for the "Move to Folder" function is something I've been missing for years! But it throws an error. See screenshot. Error: invalid args uids for command "imap_move_emails: invalid type: string "e7ce0440-5a5e-470c-a6b4-ea2e52606505:INBOX:34363", expected u32 
And then there's the annoying issue of the window being cut off at the bottom. It's not really a problem; you just scroll up and then try again. But perhaps it could be technically determined where the active window ends, so that a menu doesn't end up in the invisible area. But that's more of a cosmetic issue. See screenshot. Once the function is working again: Great! Good luck with troubleshooting! 
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Hello! Unfortunately, version .12 isn't the solution. While I don't get an error message, the emails aren't being moved. On the contrary, I now have two different states in my Apple Mail program and MailVault. Deleted files are displayed in MailVault, files moved there are still in the inbox, and files moved in Apple Mail are still visible in the MailVault inbox. Furthermore, the "Inbox" is currently loading all 26,000 emails, not just the 25 that are actually in the inbox. In other words: total chaos. Sorry, but that's how it is. I clicked "Reload," but it didn't really change anything. That's my report. |
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Hi @bson73, Sorry - that is a rotten experience, and it is on us, not on your server. Thanks for writing it up anyway. You are right that 2.11.2 did not fix it. The move fix in that release was real, but it was for a different bug. Your report is not a moving problem at all: nothing failed to move. Your server is Dovecot, and Dovecot files every folder inside INBOX - INBOX.Archive, INBOX.Trash, INBOX.Kunden, 59 of them. In 2.11.1 we added the folder tree: clicking a folder now also lists everything filed under it, so clicking "Kunden" shows Kunden and its subfolders. On a server like yours, that rule quietly turns "Inbox" into "the whole account" - your 26,000 emails instead of the 25 that are really in the Inbox. Every symptom you saw falls out of that one mistake: You move a message → it lands in INBOX., still inside the branch the Inbox is showing. The move happened; the list still shows it. There is a second, smaller bug riding along: on that same click we also wrote those 26,000 rows into the Inbox's local list, so it now paints the wrong list straight off the disk before it even asks your server. That is why Reload felt useless. Both are fixed together, and the Inbox list gets rebuilt from the server. The fix itself is one rule: when every folder on a server lives under INBOX, "Inbox" means the Inbox, not the whole tree. It is written and in testing now and ships as 2.11.3 - I will post here the moment it is live. Until then, every folder except Inbox is telling you the truth; the Inbox row is the only one lying. Because this one got past us on your kind of server, the fix is being written test-first - literally while I write this. The tests build an account shaped like yours: every folder under INBOX, including the "Inbox" spelling some Dovecot setups use, plus one odd folder sitting outside the tree, and they check that clicking Inbox gives you the Inbox while clicking "Lieferanten" still gives you Lieferanten and everything under it. They fail against today's build and pass against the fix, and one of them drives the whole app against a Dovecot-style mail server, so the click is proven end to end rather than in theory. That is what keeps this from quietly coming back in a later release. Sorry again for making you doubt your own mailbox. And thank you - the detail in that report, especially the 26,000 vs 25, is what pointed straight at the cause. |
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Thank you. Everything looks good. I'll continue testing and have a few more ideas to customize it to my liking. But as I've said several times before: thank you for the exceptionally good service and support. Thank you very much. |
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Thank you for the patience, and for the kind words. Bugs happen, and the ones reported here were real. Reporting them the way you do is why they got fixed in hours instead of months. How MailVault is built: TDD, test first. Two layers - unit tests for the logic, and end-to-end tests that drive the actual packaged app on a real Mac, clicking real buttons. Right now that is about 3,260 automated tests: ~2,400 unit and component tests, 541 end-to-end, and 321 in the Rust core and the sync daemon. Every bug reported in this thread got a test that fails without the fix, so it cannot come back. I try to cover everything. Edge cases still slip through: a Swedish folder name, a 59-folder tree, a search hit from another folder. That is exactly the shape of thing tests do not imagine on their own until someone hits it. The goal stays the same, everything covered by tests. In general I think the quality is good. My own standard is higher than that. The pace is high, and verifying is the hard part, not writing the code. Two write-ups on how this gets tested, if you are curious: https://graphicmeat.com/blog/tauri-e2e-tests-mac-mini - running the E2E suite on a dedicated Mac mini against the real app Keep the ideas coming. Customizing it to your liking is the point. 🙏 |
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Hi Rokas,
I’ve been been using MailVault on and off for a little over a month, and have discovered another possible “edge case” issue you might be interested in looking into. For the first time since I installed MailVault, I’m now able to create complete backups of my 43,000 email Gmail account by using a workaround for this issue.
I’ve also been following the very good, helpful answers you’ve been giving another user, and they got me thinking. I then read your description online of how you test MailVault, and believe my situation created an issue that hasn’t yet been fully tested.
To summarize, I have 43,000 emails in about 30 or more folders and subfolders in Gmail. I noticed that downloading emails proceeds at a rate of 1,500 - 2,000 per hour. Although I have more than enough internet connectivity, this seems right for Gmail. It isn't a MailVault issue.
About a month ago, you updated MallVault at my request to move all my data folders to an external drive. Clearly, it’s not as fast as my internal drive, even though it checks out fine with Disk Utility and there have been no read-write errors.
Nevertheless, MailVault would lock up without an explicit error message after 60 - 90 minutes. I have other programs that write large amounts of data to this disk, including one that downloads my photos from iCloud in full form and another that downloads all my iCloud program data. Both of these programs work fine while using my M1 Mini for other tasks. I was not running these while MailVault was running.
MailVault does not use too much memory, and memory pressure remains good all the time during its use. So what was the problem? I realized that Time Machine was backing up certain directories on this external drive hourly. When it is is doing so, Time Machine backups are slower and I assume MailVault is also slower in writing its data. I should have excluded the MailVault data folders from Time Machine backups, but didn't think to do so back then.
Ongoing Time Machine backups don’t interfere with the operations of other programs I use, even those that use this external drive, but it seems that the latency or slow speed of writing data to my external drive became too long for MailVault. It froze every single time without an error message. I was never able to get past the first 2,000 or 3,000 emails before this would happen. I’d have to restart MailVault, but going over the same folder would stop at about the same time again and again.
I realize now that trying to backup data (the entire email database is about 20 GB) while it is being written is an edge case. It was never a memory issue, but a disk issue. Time Machine backups are now turned off while using MailVault. The MailVault data has been moved once more, this time to inside a folder that is excluded from Time Machine backups. It would be helpful if MailVault could either put up a useful error message or exit in a graceful manner when this sort of problem occurs.
TLDR - using an external drive can be great when the internal drive has too little space, but it’s necessary to prevent Time Machine from accessing this data while MailVault is running. An error message would make discovering this issue much easier. Is more error tolerance even possible?
Thanks very much for your persistence in debugging and improving MailVault. Even though your most recent online replies weren’t directly related to my issues, reading your emails showed your dedication to improving this app. They were the reason I kept looking into this issue until it was resolved.
Bruce
… On Aug 5, 2026, at 4:36 PM, Rokas Ambrazevicius ***@***.***> wrote:
Hey Bruce,
Happy to help and happy you made progress. I believe that the email should always be yours.
The ~user/library/containers/com.gmail.app seems to not be a MailVault directory. I think that one might be used by a GMail app. MailVault should use ~user/library/containers/com.mailvault.
Thanks for kind words, this means a lot. 🙇
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Your diagnosis is right, and it found a real bug. Thank you for chasing it that far. Time Machine reading the drive was the trigger, but the freeze was MailVault's fault. Two things were wrong in the backup path: Every wait on the mail server was unbounded. A slow write held up a worker thread, the in-flight Gmail connections sat unread long enough for Gmail (or a NAT along the way) to drop them, and the next read then waited on a dead socket for ever. That is why it stopped without an error, why Cancel did nothing, and why restarting stopped again at roughly the same place: the same folder, the same size, the same point where the disk fell behind. Both are fixed. Every server wait in a backup is now bounded at one minute per message, so a dropped connection ends the run with a readable error in the backup card instead of hanging. The writes and folder scans moved off the connection threads. Messages are written to a temporary name and renamed into place, so a run interrupted mid-write no longer leaves a half file that the next run mistakes for a stored message. On top of that, two things aimed straight at your situation: It notices a struggling drive and backs off. Each message write is timed. Three writes in a row that each take over two seconds means the drive, not one file, so the backup waits 30 seconds before the next download and the backup card says "Backup drive is slow (4.2s per file). Waiting 30s before continuing." The first normal write clears it. So instead of piling more work onto a drive that is already behind, it paces itself and tells you what it is doing. You can pick the hours. Settings > Backup & Restore > Backup Schedule has a fourth frequency, "At set hours (when idle)": choose which hours of the day backups run. Meant for exactly this, a drive something else reads on its own schedule. Pick the hours Time Machine is not on it, and you do not have to turn Time Machine off. Both landed in the next release. Excluding the vault folder from Time Machine is still the better setup and worth keeping. But the app should never have gone silent, and now it should either pace itself or fail with a message. If it ever locks up again after you update, whatever text the backup card shows at that moment would be the most useful thing you could send. https://github.com/GraphicMeat/mail-vault-app/releases/tag/v2.12.0 |
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Hi Rokas,
Thank you so much for this fix. I found there was a disk error in the files created by MailVault, so I deleted all the data files and would like to try again. Now Disk Utility reports the disk is good, so I assume APFS has removed the bad nodes from its directory.
I have two problems now:
1. I don’t know how to reset MailVault to start again. It fails on syncing because it can’t find the deleted data.
2. I can’t set backup schedules because I don’t have premium, so I still need to turn off Time Machine, at least until MailVault has completed its initial backup.
Thanks.
Bruce
… On Sep 7, 2026, at 4:58 AM, Rokas Ambrazevicius ***@***.***> wrote:
Your diagnosis is right, and it found a real bug. Thank you for chasing it that far.
Time Machine reading the drive was the trigger, but the freeze was MailVault's fault. Two things were wrong in the backup path:
Every wait on the mail server was unbounded. A slow write held up a worker thread, the in-flight Gmail connections sat unread long enough for Gmail (or a NAT along the way) to drop them, and the next read then waited on a dead socket for ever. That is why it stopped without an error, why Cancel did nothing, and why restarting stopped again at roughly the same place: the same folder, the same size, the same point where the disk fell behind.
The disk work ran on the same threads that keep those connections alive. Five downloads in parallel could block most of the runtime, so a slow drive did not just slow the backup down, it starved it.
Both are fixed. Every server wait in a backup is now bounded at one minute per message, so a dropped connection ends the run with a readable error in the backup card instead of hanging. The writes and folder scans moved off the connection threads. Messages are written to a temporary name and renamed into place, so a run interrupted mid-write no longer leaves a half file that the next run mistakes for a stored message.
On top of that, two things aimed straight at your situation:
It notices a struggling drive and backs off. Each message write is timed. Three writes in a row that each take over two seconds means the drive, not one file, so the backup waits 30 seconds before the next download and the backup card says "Backup drive is slow (4.2s per file). Waiting 30s before continuing." The first normal write clears it. So instead of piling more work onto a drive that is already behind, it paces itself and tells you what it is doing.
You can pick the hours. Settings > Backup & Restore > Backup Schedule has a fourth frequency, "At set hours (when idle)": choose which hours of the day backups run. Meant for exactly this, a drive something else reads on its own schedule. Pick the hours Time Machine is not on it, and you do not have to turn Time Machine off.
Both landed in the next release.
Excluding the vault folder from Time Machine is still the better setup and worth keeping. But the app should never have gone silent, and now it should either pace itself or fail with a message. If it ever locks up again after you update, whatever text the backup card shows at that moment would be the most useful thing you could send.
https://github.com/GraphicMeat/mail-vault-app/releases/tag/v2.12.0
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Hey Bruce, 
Let me know how it goes 🤞 |
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Hello. :) Today I have a technical question. Let's say I have 15 GB of email data, all of which is backed up in MailVault in two locations. I then run the cleanup function, and everything older than 24 months is deleted from the server and remains only in the archives. Now I manually delete all the folders I demonstrably no longer need from my folder structure on the server. How will MailVault react? Will the search function still work? Can I still open the files now that the live and archive folders are separated in the structure? And let's assume, for a future scenario, that I create a new folder with the exact same name as a folder I deleted. What would happen? Would the safer approach be to run the automatic cleanup without deleting any folders? I can live with that. They're just empty folders. The thing is, you sometimes stop using certain providers, and that makes the folder redundant. Thank you for your assessment. |
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Good question, and answering it properly turned up three bugs, so thank you for asking before doing it. The short version first. Nothing in MailVault ever deletes a vault or mirror file because the server lost it. Not the sync, not the scheduled backup, not "Verify backup coverage". The only things that remove local mail are "Delete everywhere", the Purge button in Settings, and deleting the account. So in every scenario you describe the mail survives on disk. What changes is what you can see, and that is where the honest part starts. Old mail deleted from the server, folder kept. This works. The rows stay in that folder's list for ever, open from the vault, show up in search, and export. Deleted through MailVault they are marked "Your only copy"; deleted from another client they show "Saved in your vault" until MailVault next confirms the server copy is gone. Verify backup coverage will show the vault count above the server count for that folder, which is expected. Folder deleted on the server. The sidebar draws the folder list the server sends, so the folder disappears from the sidebar. Its vault directory and its copy on the backup drive stay exactly as they were. Search with "All folders" still finds that mail, full text, and opening a hit works. What does not work today: browsing that folder as a folder, restoring it to the server with one click, and the coverage screen no longer lists it. That is a gap, not a design decision. I am adding a "Vault only" section to the sidebar for folders the server no longer has, with browse and put-back-on-the-server. A new folder with the same name. Do not do this yet. The server gives the recreated folder a new numbering, and MailVault re-keys the vault when you next open it: messages still on the server are matched by Message-ID and renumbered, and messages the server no longer has, which is all of your old archived mail, are moved into a holding directory called orphaned next to the folder. Nothing is deleted, but today the app does not show, search or export that directory. Settings shows a count and offers to delete it, nothing else. Until the vault-only view above ships, the old mail would still be on disk but effectively invisible. If you need the name back, keep the old folder and give the new one a different name. The cleanup rule. I would not use it for this plan, and I say that as the person who wrote it:
All three are fixed next: every folder, a byte-level check of the vault and the backup drive copy before any server delete, delete through Trash, and a report of what it did. I will post here when it is live. Until then, delete old mail from inside MailVault: sort a folder by date, select the range, delete. MailVault records that it removed the server copy, keeps the vault copy, and the rows show "Your only copy". So, your own instinct is right. Keep the folders, empty. Do not reuse a deleted folder's name for now. Before any large delete, open Verify backup coverage and check every row is at 100 percent. Empty folders cost nothing, and the fix for the rest is on me. |
MailVault 2.13.0Two new ways to look at your mail, and the smaller things that came with them. InsightsA workspace of its own in the sidebar, built on the mail MailVault already holds on your device. Three views over the same data:
The three share one set of filters (account, date range, direction, and an option to hide likely automated senders), and every view drills down to the messages behind it. It reads cached and vaulted headers across folders, and where its coverage is partial it says so rather than showing you a picture that pretends to be complete. Your ordinary mail view stays exactly where you left it when you come back. 
ExplorerA second way to browse a folder, sitting beside the ordinary list. Switch to Explorer and browse by Date, Sender, or Date then Conversation. Each group carries its email, unread and vault counts, takes selection and a local search, and remembers where you left off; optional day groups add another level. Opening a message uses the same reader and the same actions as the list does. These are automatic views of mail you already have, with explicit loading for larger mailboxes. 
Also new
Fixed
DownloadmacOS (.dmg), Linux (.deb for x86_64 and arm64), and the Snap Store. Existing macOS installs will offer the update on their own. https://github.com/GraphicMeat/mail-vault-app/releases/tag/v2.13.0 |
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Many thanks for the new version. However, as much as I appreciate the batch editing feature, it doesn't work when moving emails. There is no error message; the click simply triggers no action. Thank you and have a nice day. :) 
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Thanks for the report, and sorry for the trouble. Investigating now. The selection bar is part of the new UI, and it looks like the Move button got disconnected from the folder list along the way. Will post here once the fix is out. |
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v2.13.1 is out with the fix. What was wrong: the selection bar can scroll sideways on a narrow window, and the folder list the Move button opens was drawn inside that scrolling strip, which clipped it away. The list was there, and nothing showed. It now opens above the bar, in line with the button. A move also reports its progress now: a small card at the bottom right shows "Moving..." with the count, then "Moved 3 messages to " once the server has them. Thanks for the screenshot, it pointed straight at it. If Move still misbehaves for you after updating, reply here and I will look again. |
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