Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Sorry I haven't followed this thread all the way through so the question has probably already been asked, what is the advantage of doing this over say configuring fetchmail to drop your mail into IMAP folders and using any client(s) you like to collect the messages from those ?
Well fetchmail is a pretty big disadvantage in itself...
With TB I have (already set up, which is probably the key factor) a GUI for configuring the mail collection from several accounts, the distribution of that mail into several folders, a half (quarter?) decent spam filter processing that mail, etc. And I have a means for viewing it.
Alternatively, I can move all that to a combination of Fetchmail and other components, and have TB read it via IMAP, all so that I end up where I am now, but with the opportunity to access the mail via IMAP from elsewhere. That is a perfectly reasonable, sensible, and suitable solution, it's just not convenient given that TB is already in and working doing all those jobs, where it would be better if I could hook into the existing system instead (the more I think about it, the more I think having TB natively support Maildir would be the way to go, rather than have it expose a web or IMAP interface).
If TB didn't have the add-on capabilities of FF I wouldn't have even considered it, but given that it does it's quite feasible that I'm not the only person to have thought about this, and someone else might have done something about it.
Evolution does natively handle Maildir, although last time I tried it I found that the account creation wizard for maildir was a bit broken, and I was also getting instances of Evolution bugging out on me. This was many versions ago though so things may have improved. Although I would still have to say that having two clients accessing the same maildir sounds a bit fishy to me compared to doing it with IMAP. Was there a particular reason you wanted to do the mail collection bit from TB ?
Reasoning: mostly that its there and works, with all the mail rules and spam filtering in place. Of-course a mixture of (eg) SpamAssassin, procmail, fetchmail, etc could achieve the same thing.
Regarding multiple programs accessing Maildir: as far as I know it *should* work, that being a major reason behind its existance. Given that mail arrives, gets moved around and/or deleted, but once it's arrived it doesn't get edited, it should be safe for multiple applications to read it, albeit that the user might get confused if using more than one mail client simultaneously (which is unlikely).
There are other good reasons for supporting Maildir instead of mbox; incremental mail back up, for example, is much easier when it's clear where the increments are (with mbox you pretty much backup the whole mail spool each time).