Re: That newfangled IMAP thing...

[Greg Troxel <gdt@work.lexort.com>]

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  But I have no idea how it works, really.  You point Gnus at an IMAP
  server, and then what?  How do you tell it how to split your email and
  stuff?

Others have replied, but I thought I'd explain what I do.

I have split mail with procmail for a long time, and used to used MH-E
to read it.  Then I got a handheld (palm TX) that did IMAP, and
converted to IMAP for storage of my mail.  This caused me to switch to
gnus, because it was on the short list of sane readers with imap
support.

Now, I use 3 devices to read mail:

  gnus on the same computer as the imap server

  iphone (just inbox)

  mac and Mail.app (just inbox, occasionally slightly more)

Most imap folders (== groups in gnus) I read only with gnus; I'd go
crazy without scoring and 'c y'.

Given the above setup, it's critical to have something
pre-final-delivery do spliting.  A lot of the point is to avoid putting
anything in my INBOX unless it's timely and personal - so i can not have
the phone pull it down and not have my brain have to deal with mail with
a slow UI unless it's important - and I'd like that to happen without
gnus running anywhere.

I'm not a raving fan of procmail, but it's good enough and basically I
add a new rule for every mailinglist.  I have 1200 lines (wc -l) between
two accounts, which is more or less 300 commented rules.

From the gnus/imap point of view, what I'd like to see is:

  any caching/agent support to explicitly get that other imap clients
  can change state of the mailbox

  perhaps faster polling by using imap features more smartly

  accurate unread counts by asking the server for unread, not computing
  on sequence numbers

Features I wouldn't necessarily use, but might be cool

  storing gnus split rules as sieve rules on the server.  The basic
  problem is that with imap you usually want multiple clients to deal.

I have really been pretty happy with gnus' imap support over the last
4.5 years.

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