On 03 Feb 10:37, Chris G wrote:
On Tue, Feb 03, 2009 at 10:07:27AM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
We *do* use an IMAP server but, being somewhat paranoid and also sometimes needing to see mail when the ADSL or something dies it's a good idea to keep archives at least on the local system. Not to mention that an IMAP server with >2Gb of E-Mail tends to get a bit slow at times.
brettp@miranda:~/Maildir$ du -sh 1.6G . brettp@miranda:~/Maildir$
So, that's 1.6G of mail, that I access through IMAP all the time...
(Weirdly, even though I'm using mutt, and my mail is stored on the same box as I'm composing this, I read my mail via imap - it's slightly quicker for some situations, and lots quicker when I have large maildirs).
Personally I use mutt too but it's not for everyone. My mutt runs on a remote system (I have ssh access to my hosting provider) so I can access it from anywhere using ssh - from my Nokia E71 if need be.
My mutt runs on a remote system too, it happens to be the mailserver, and I know from experience that it's quicker to access my mail via the IMAP server running on the mailserver than by talking directly to the Maildirs. Also uses less memory (as the IMAP server has a neat index on the Maildir).
So maildir is slow for you! :-) That's one of the reasons that I use mostly mbox where I run my mutt. OK, horses for courses, it depends on the circumstances which will be faster. On the system I use there's considerable overhead for each file access so accessing one large file is much faster than accessing lots of small files. Oh, and my mutt most definitely *isn't* running on the mailserver so running IMAP would involve lots of networking to and fro.
The IMAP server talks to the same Maildir... so, err... it's just that the IMAP server also keeps a nice cache of things it's already seen, and so there's not a full scan of the directories by mutt everytime I switch folders.
At work I use mutt + a tunnel config that ssh's to the mailserver and spits IMAP over the ssh connection (mostly because that way I don't need to store my password anywhere, and my ssh key's passphrase is handled by ssh-agent - much niceness).
offlineimap is a neat way of syncing mail between machines, and would be what I'd end up using if I wanted an offline copy anywhere... probably using a set of tunnels for that... and a local IMAP server on the laptop...
dovecot is lovely.
Oh, and I can access it from anywhere using ssh, even from my phone (well, any of the 4 that I currently carry with me... which includes my 2 "spare" phones).
So we agree it's a good way of reading mail! :-)
However I don't think I can persuade the rest of my family that mutt is the way to read their mail.
And that's why using straight IMAP is the obvious answer - no one has to then stick to one particular mail client. My phone, for instance, at the moment picks up my INBOX via IMAP, it's running Pocket Outlook (yes, I know) - it just works. And it's talking to my mail at the same time as mutt. If I got really bored I could also connect thunderbird to it, or GNUmail (wow, the menus on that were a PITA), or $names_of_random_other_mail_clients_here... anything that can talk IMAP4.
Ho hum,