Re: isync plus dovecot?

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> writes:

> on Wed May 15 2013, Eric Abrahamsen <eric-AT-ericabrahamsen.net> 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.

[...]

>> Specifically, you tell offlineimap to deliver to dovecot with a line
>> like:
>>
>> preauthtunnel = /usr/lib/dovecot/imap -o mail_location=maildir:$HOME/Maildir

[...]

> Here's my fairly-complicated .mbsyncrc, including the preauth tunneling
> thing:

Okay, with help from Dave I'm now up and running with
mbsync/dovecot/gnus. It wasn't actually all that hard in the end,
the offlineimap and mbsync invocations were very similar.

I'm now able to access most mail through gnus, with one strange
exception: I've got several imap accounts, with a separate server per
account, and when I go into the individual servers via the *Server*
buffer they all look something like this:

22879: INBOX
    0: [Gmail]
    0: [Gmail]
    0: [Gmail]
    0: [Gmail]
    0: [Gmail]
    0: [Gmail]
8127: [Gmail]/Sent Mail

I'm guessing the empty entries represent Drafts, Important, Sent Mail,
Spam, Starred, and Trash, because each account only has Gmail's standard
folders (I haven't used imap before).  I suspect it has something to do
with the fact that the dovecot invocation in both mbsync and gnus looks
like:

/usr/lib/dovecot/imap -o
mail_location=maildir:$HOME/.mail/account1/:LAYOUT=fs:LAYOUT=fs:INDEX=$HOME/.mail/indexes/account1

Is it likely that separating the indexes from the mailboxes would
confuse gnus (or the gnus-dovecot conversation)?

If so, I assume I could remove this separation, and just carefully move
everything inside ~/.mail/indexes/account1 to ~/.mail/account1 ?

Thanks for any pointers (and for getting me this far),

Eric