[Techtalk] poll: fave Linux IMAP MUA

[Akkana Peck]

Teri Solow writes:
> On Sat, May 15, 2004 at 07:14:46PM -0700, Carla Schroder said:
> > Ok chix0rs, what's your favorite MUA to use for IMAP?
> > And perhaps a few words on why you like it?
> 
> Personally, I use offlineimap to sync up my computers to my mail
> server's IMAP folders.  That creates local maildirs that match up to
> the IMAP folders- then I just use mutt with the local folders :)

Several people have said this now.  I used to use offlineimap for
my laptop while travelling (then use mutt locally to read the mail),
but I found that mutt really doesn't handle maildir format very
well: primarily, I had problems with messages not showing the right
status (showing as unread when I'd marked them read, or vice versa).

I've switched to using mailsync instead. It does the same thing
as offlineimap but uses Berkeley mailbox format instead of maildir,
so it plays better with mutt.  It also seems to get less confused
by messages that move between folders (for instancee, when something
gets misfiled to my spam folder and I move it back to Inbox).
The released version of mailsync is pretty old; anyone wanting to
try mailsync is well advised to use the CVS version and build from
source.

The only thing I don't like about mailsync (which seems to be a
bug in the c-client library, not mailsync itself) is that there's
a problem with the way it modifies the last-modified vs.
last-accessed times on local folders, so mutt doesn't see that
there's new mail.  But offlineimap+mutt didn't get that quite
right either, because of the maildir status problem.

<geeky_imap_problem>
I wrote a wrapper script to fix the last-modified problem (call
"touch" on any folder that had new mail), but my wrapper calls
mailsync for each folder, and it turns out that connecting on the
imap port of our server many times in a short period somehow
confuses inetd so further connections are refused, and the only
solution is to restart inetd.  (Debian woody, uw-imapd; anyone seen
anything like this, or know of a solution?)
</geeky_imap_problem>

	...Akkana