Taming hotmail (or how to handle pop3 accounts in Gnus)

[Johnny <yggdrasil@gmx.co.uk>]

Dear list,

'---------- LONG STORYLINE (short story below) ----------

I am writing you out of (yet) another unpleasant experience in my
relationship with hotmail. As hotmail does not provide imap services, as
far as I am aware, I have so far relied on the pop service. I still like
to keep my mails online, in case I have a casual encounter with someone
elses machine for accessing my mails. A convenient solution has been to use
gmx (I think also gmail provides this) to set it up to pop my hotmail
and leave the mails on the server and exclusively access the popped gmx
version of hotmail. Of course, this leaves the hotmail server in a sad
state (unsorted, unfiltered, undeleted and generally filthy), but at
least the mails /could/ be retrieved from there if necessary. This
trinity (hotmail -pop> gmx <-imap-> gnus) worked out fine until one
day...

Suddenly gmx stopped autofetching from hotmail, and I am now forced to
use their web interface and click around, in particular on "check new
mail" for the synch to take place. I don't know why this happened and
have been unable to coerce gmx into it's previous submissive state. 

Out of this expereience, and a general quest to be in control of my own
data, I am considering drastic measures, such as *fetchmail* to pop all
hotmails (keeping them on the server as well of course, just in case)
into a local maildir. This will enhance management capabilities I am
sure (I raised a previous query on inserting missing fields in heades
(aka re-parenting) in mails, but that doesn't seem to work through
imap), but at the same time will limit me to access my organised mails
in a convenient way (e.g. the imap on gmx which kept / keeps all mails
and are synched to gnus). Clearly, I will be limited to access the local
maildir when (surprise!) I have access to the local machine. This can be
relived by ssh to some extent, but it clearly requires the machine to be
up and running, which may not always be ideal. 

I have also seen the discussions here about offlineimap and dovecot
which looks relevant for any imap accounts, and the idea is thus
something like:

'---------- SHORT STORYLINE STARTS HERE ----------

- IMAP mails: *offlineimap* and *dovecot* to keep a local copy in sync with
  a remote server
- POP mails: *fetchmail* to keep a local copy, but leave the mails on the
  remote server as is (not possible to sync)

Then set all up through a nnml backend in gnus and viola! (or at least,
so I think...)

Before I set out on this quest however, is there any ideas or advice from
the experience here on how to efficiently and flexibly handle multiple
e-mail accounts through both POP and IMAP (with a preference for having
synchronised mailboxes accessible on-line, if possible also for POP)?

Thanks for any ideas!

-- 
Johnny