Re: isync plus dovecot?

[Drew Raines <aaraines@gmail.com>]

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!

Drew