Re: isync plus dovecot?

[Dan Christensen <jdc@uwo.ca>]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

>>> Is it enough just to have mbsync dump to a Maildir directly, and then
>>> tell gnus to access that maildir via dovecot?
>>
>> That might work too, but I decided to let dovecot be in charge of the
>> Maildir directory, and make both Gnus and offlineimap interact with that
>> directory via the IMAP protocol.  My method of syncing the non-standard
>> flags relies on this.
>
> Ugh, clearly I just don't know enough about how this all actually works
> to make an informed decision. I don't even really get what letting
> dovecot "be in charge of the Maildir directory" really means. 

Offlineimap has two modes of operation.  The original way it worked
was to connect to a remote IMAP server using the IMAP protocol and
to write directly to a Maildir in the local filesystem.  In this
mode of operation, you don't need a local IMAP server like dovecot,
it's just a Maildir <--> remote IMAP sync.

An alternate way is for offlineimap to synchronize between two IMAP
servers located anywhere on the internet.  Offlineimap uses the IMAP
protocol to do this, and has no knowledge of how the servers store
the messages on disk.  I use this way.

> And if the other Eric is able to use the native Gnus agent and it
> works fine offline, why is everyone jumping through all these hoops?

It seems to me that there are very frequent complaints about the agent /
IMAP interaction on this mailing list, and I believe that Lars doesn't
use the agent (at least not for IMAP), so I don't trust that set-up.

Dan