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• mutt? (Score:1)

  by inkdroid (3294)

  This is probably the most obvious one, and I haven't had a chance to try it out myself....but did you give mutt [mutt.org] a try?
  • Re:mutt? (Score:1)

    by barries (2159)

    Mutt is a very poor IMAP client for large folders or large numbers of folders.

    Mutt was designed to munge local mail repositories very well and very powerfully (and I love it for that, and for its one-keystroke to do almost anything UI).

    OTOH, IMAP centralizes a lowest common denominator set of search and ordering functions so IMAP clients can minimize the amount of data they need to suck down to present a usable set of browsing & email features.

    Mutt, which has more configurable and more powerful fu
    • Re:mutt? (Score:1)

      by Dom2 (2981)

      Supposedly, isync [hmc.edu] is the answer to your problems. It deals with keeping all the mail synchronised with the imap server. It's also written by the original author of mutt.

      I have no idea how well it works, just that I've spotted it before and meant to look into it.

      -Dom
      • Re:mutt? (Score:1)

        by nik (3476)

        isync's what I use. You use it to synchronise your local Maildir format mail directories to the IMAP server, and then point Mutt at the local directories.
        
        It's two main problems are the occasional crash/core dump (which, if you don't notice it, can leave stale isynclock files around which will stop a particular mail directory from being synced), and an overly anal configuration file format -- you can't simply say "Sync everything from this server", you have to specify each IMAP mailbox, and the local mail
        • Re:mutt? (Score:2)

          by Matts (1087)

          I don't get it. iSync's solution appears to be basically download all the messages locally and sync back any changes I make to the IMAP server.
          
          That seems only slightly better than POP, and seems to miss the point of IMAP (i.e. I don't have to have a local store of all the messages).
          
          I'm not really sure why the mutt developers don't fix this. Everyone who is happy to not use IMAP raves about how mutt is so much better than everything else, so I'm confused that if they can get everything else *so* right, how
          • Re:mutt? (Score:1)

            by nik (3476) <nikc@cpan.org> on 2003.01.27 6:21 (#16408) Journal

            I don't get it. iSync's solution appears to be basically download all the messages locally and sync back any changes I make to the IMAP server.

            Yes. "Disconnected mode" in the parlance (I think). This is a good thing if you do a lot of mail reading where network connectivity isn't available (trains, planes, and, er automobiles :-) ). I imagine it's less useful if you spend most of the time connected.

            I guess it depends on what you want to use it for. My previous hack involved using rsync to send mbox files back and forth between different machines, but didn't scale terribly well.

            In re Mutt not supporting large IMAP folders terribly well, this is similar to Mutt's so-so support for Maildir style folders, in as much as it doesn't cache the header information, so reading large Maildir folders (and also IMAP folders) is slow, because all the message meta-information has to be re-read each time.

            There's a patch that implements this caching for Maildir folders at http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~me/mutt/ [hmc.edu], with a note that it could be adapted for IMAP as well -- it might be worth some investigation.

            N

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