Nickolai Dobrynin wrote: > Christoph, can you please clarify a few things? > > > Hello, are you aware of the solution where dovecot is run locally > > on-demand (there’s no daemon) and stores mail in Maildir format? > > "On demand" means that dovecot would potentially be run many times > over, i.e. every time the user wants to check his mail? Does this also > mean that dovecot would connect to the IMAP server(s) repeatedly > (rather than once per session)?
No, the local dovecot is not even aware of the remote IMAP servers. It’s only the IMAP syncing tool (in my case ‘mbsync’) that synchronizes both on-demand. > > Email is fetched with an IMAP-to-IMAP synchronizer like mbsync from > > the isync package. > > Assume that dovecot has mirrored all my e-mails locally. Now, I could, > theoretically, point GNUS directly to that storage. This seems to be > all I need. So, where does mbsync come in? In my case the local dovecot stores all my mail since 1997 or so. Gnus accesses this local IMAP server and is not aware of anything else (as far as mail fetching goes). The job of mbsync is to synchronize the local store with remote IMAP servers, i.e. fetch new mail, and push changes (e.g. the unread- and starred status of messages, or in which folder they reside). mbsync is extremely robust, in many years I never had any problem with it, even when having a flaky network connections for example. I use k9-mail on my phone. K9 talks to the IMAP servers, and everything propagates nicely between it and Gnus. > > Other email clients can either access the Maildir directly, or talk > > to the local dovecot like Gnus or the sync program. > > Same as above: how does the syncing program fit into this setup? Im my setup the local dovecot stores the messages in Maildir format, so it might be possible to access these Maildirs directly with Gnus. I have never tried this, because it was never necessary, and I seem to recall that Gnus’ and dovecot’s Maildir are not entirely compatible. Anyway, I prefer if only one software (dovecot) has direct access to the messages.
