On Mon, Dec 08, 2014 at 03:19:55PM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
> At the moment to access my mail remotely I ssh into the server and run
> mutt. This works well in general but there are some disadvantages, in
> particular the 'v' command to access and view HTML, PDF and other
[...]
>
> So, I'm wondering if using IMAP would make my life easier. I would
> run Dovecot I expect. If I do this do things become more transparent
> to a remote mutt?
Just as a data point I'll note that I use both methods on a daily
basis. As you guessed, aside from the attachment situation there
isn't much difference.
At home I use ssh and run mutt on my mail server. When I have to
access attachments I use sshfs to access my homedir on the server.
At work I use IMAP (actually IMAPS) because the IT department uses
Microsoft Exchange as their mail server. There are some annoying
issues with how Exchange's IMAP module sometimes handles TNEF messages
sent by Outlook users, but that's something you wouldn't need to deal
with if you're running your IMAP server on Linux.
In the IMAP situation I can still edit messages in my inbox,
link/unlink threads, move messages between folders including back and
forth between IMAP folders and local maildir directories, and so on.
One case where IMAP might be a downside is if you often have to search
the message bodies, since I think they aren't cached on the mutt side
and will have to be retrieved over IMAP each time you do a search.
The headers do get cached by mutt.
-Dave Dodge/dodo...@dododge.net
