Re: new gnus setup with Dovecot

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Benjamin Slade <slade@jnanam.net> writes:

>> I wrote this last year, and it's more focused on searching, but the
>> basic setup should be plenty viable for you. See if this helps!
>>
>> https://ericabrahamsen.net/tech/2014/oct/gnus-dovecot-lucene.html
>
> Thanks for this. It looks very close to what I need to set up. Multiple
> accounts etc. I was originally thinking to try to piggyback the Gnus
> setup on the offlineimap setup I already have for mu4e (so that I could
> continue to use both), but looking at the details of the setup, it seems
> like it would be better to do a separate setup with mbsync and a
> separate maildir for gnus.

I don't know exactly what you're doing, but if the mails are all coming
down to a single dovecot installation, it really shouldn't matter how
you're feeding dovecot (offlineimap vs mbsync), or reading from it (gnus
vs mu4e). Dovecot does a nice job of funneling everything into the same
setup.

> Does this setup synchronise well across machines?  I have 3 different
> machines that need to synchronise.  For the older offlineimap setup of
> http://roland.entierement.nu/blog/2010/09/08/gnus-dovecot-offlineimap-search-a-howto.html
> , I note that he customises offlineimap.py to synchronise some Gnus
> flags (expire). Can something equivalent be done with mbsync, or this is
> no longer necessary?

I can't tell you about custom flags, that's something I've never tried
to do. Hopefully someone else might jump in with information that...

I keep mail sync'ed between two different machines, and it works great.
It worked okay when I was using Gmail as a backend, and since I switched
my mail setup to self-hosted (also with Dovecot on the server), it works
even better. It's been perfect synchronization, so far, though as I say
I haven't tried custom flags.

> Is the Lucien search solution working out well for you? One thing I do
> really like about mu4e is the speed and flexibility of search.

Lucene search works great. What's awkward is the IMAP search syntax, and
particularly Gnus' interaction with it: the nnir search interface to
IMAP seems unnecessarily clunky. I have extremely iffy results when
doing date-based searches, but I don't know if I should blame
dovecot/lucene, or gnus/nnir.

So I guess yes on the speed, maybe not so much on the flexibility.

HTH,

Eric