On 09Dec2014 10:33, Chris Green <c...@isbd.net> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 09, 2014 at 06:21:31PM +1100, Cameron Simpson wrote:
On 08Dec2014 22:04, Chris Green <c...@isbd.net> wrote:
>Doesn't anyone use IMAP? I must admit when I tried it (a few times
>over the years, but not very recently) it never felt quite as easy and
>transparent as using mutt on a local mail spool.
I would advocate trying offlineimap. I am a huge fan of having one's
mail local to the machine for all the reasons you have outlined.
[snip]
Well, looking at offlineimap has lead me to notmuch as well which has
got me thinking down those lines too! :-)
However, for me, moving to offlineimap involves quite a bit of
reconfiguration work as I currently use mbox and I don't have an IMAP
server running on the machine where the E-Mails initially get
delivered.
You can probably install dovecot on the main machine easily. If the remote
machine is personal (you desktop machine, yes?) you could configure its IMAP
and POP services to listen only on localhost for security; use an ssh port
forward to gain remote access to them.
If you choose offlineimap for bidirectional mirroring then you have the maildir
conversion issue to consider.
Note that maildirs do take more disc space due to the separation of messages
into individual files. My personal practice is presently to use maildirs for
most "live" folders and to use mbox for archival folders. Offlineimap does not
need to mirror all your folders; it can manage an arbitrary subset.
Then the primary change is to tell dovecot to use maildirs (and to convert your
mail folders). For dovecot, the dovecot.conf file wants the mail_location
setting configured, for example:
mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir
which says to use maildir and to look for the user's folders in ~/Maildir.
Mutt will cope automatically for existing folders, though you may want to tell
it to make maildirs by default for new folders:
set mbox_type=maildir
Then there's mbox to maildir conversion. Tedious. There are ways to automate
that. The simplest may to script mutt itself. Have a look at my mboxify script:
https://bitbucket.org/cameron_simpson/css/src/tip/bin/mboxify
which I am using to progressively turn my archive folders into mboxes, and
reverse it. It has a bunch of checks, but you could pull out the core
invocation of mutt towards the bottom of the script and invert it to convert an
mbox into a maildir.
Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <c...@zip.com.au>
Your reality is lies and balderdash, and I'm glad to say that I have no grasp
of it. - Baron Munchausen
