On Tue, Feb 03, 2009 at 10:51:17AM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
On 03 Feb 10:37, Chris G wrote:
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.
Maybe so but one doesn't always have the luxury of choosing what IMAP server one uses. OK, I could change my hosting provider but their E-Mail isn't the *only* reason I stay with them.
My experience of transferring large amounts of E-Mail from one place to another using IMAP has never been trouble free though maybe things are better/cleaner/easier now.
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.
Again my experience of using multiple E-Mail clients on one IMAP server has never been quite so transparent (again maybe things are better now) I always found that there were little disagreements and foibles about how/where INBOX was (i.e. root of hierarchy or a mailbox at the first level of the hierarchy), the separators used between folders, etc.
Given that our E-Mail service hasn't been so good over the past few months (we use Gradwell) maybe I should be looking at alternatives.