Re: isync plus dovecot?

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Drew Raines <aaraines@gmail.com> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>
>> I'm finally trying to ditch nnml for mail reading, and move to
>> imap.  Offlineimap plus dovecot seems to be a popular solution (I
>> am offline a lot), but I also saw a lot of complaints about
>> offlineimap, and the suggestion of isync/mbsync as a replacement.
>>
>> Has anyone done that? I realize this isn't quite a gnus question,
>> but I'm having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around this, and
>> google isn't helping any.
>
> I'm using mbsync.  I finally switched from offlineimap a year ago
> after it got into a state that I couldn't fix.
>
> My setup is:
>
>   Gmail <-> mbsync <-> dovecot <-> nnimap
>
> dovecot essentially serves as a cache, with mbsync running every few
> minutes in a separate process.  Even though g-g-get-new-news is
> pretty speedy (5-30s), I still use a dedicated Emacs for Gnus.  It
> still talks over the Internet to Gmane.  I used to use gnus-agent
> with nnimap and it worked fine.  Now I only use it with nntp.
>
> I haven't had any major issues with mbsync.  A couple of times it has
> gotten wedged from an unreliable network connection but I was able to
> recover by deleting its local state.  It hasn't caused any headaches
> for me.  This is isync 1.0.4 on Debian Wheezy.
>
> Happy to share more details if it would help!

Thanks for this! So your .mbsyncrc has something like this, right?

MaildirStore account-local
Path = ~/Maildir/account/
Inbox ~/Maildir/account/Inbox

and then in your gnus select methods:

(nnimap-shell-program "/usr/lib/dovecot/imap -o mail_location=maildir:$HOME/Maildir/")

Is that how you do it? The offlineimap examples I've seen have
offlineimap delivering to dovecot, and gnus reading from dovecot. The
above would have mbsync delivering to a maildir directly, and then
dovecot reading from that. I'm not familiar enough with how this works
to know if that's right. And three days of mail syncing seems like a
long time just to test a setup that's wrong to begin with!

The other question I've got regards multiple accounts, either
offlineimap or mbsync. Multi-account examples I've seen have offlineimap
using a separate local repository for each account, so you end up with:

$HOME/Maildir/account1/{cur,new,tmp,etc,etc}
$HOME/Maildir/account2/{cur,new,tmp,etc,etc}
$HOME/Maildir/account3/{cur,new,tmp,etc,etc}

But in my gnus configuration, I only seem to be able to pass one value
to the "-o mail_location" invocation, and it doesn't recurse into
subdirectories. Can I dump multiple accounts into a single local
repository? Or somehow tell dovecot to check multiple directories?

Almost done, I swear...

Thanks!
Eric