Re: Caching in Maildir format

[Christoph Groth]

Nickolai Dobrynin wrote:

> 1. In order to run mbsync on demand, do you use an IDLE-capable
> daemon, mbsync on crontab, or something else? Apparently, people wrote
> several IDLE daemons, but I cannot tell which one is more reliable.

I simply run it in a terminal which is open anyway.

I prefer to treat most email asynchronously, so whenever I want to
process mail, I run mbsync.  This usually takes only four keystrokes
(Ctrl-r m b <RET>).  (For potentially urgent personal email my phone
will make a sound, so I’m not completely async.)

For me this approach has the following advantages:

• I use several IMAP servers, which are not always available, depending
  on the network/VPN to which I am connected currently.  I also might
  not be interested in email from all sources at a given moment.

• One of the IMAP servers that I have to use (Outlook...) supports only
  unusably limited server-side sorting.  So I use Gnus’ splitting, which
  means that Gnus will move new messages from the Inbox into folders,
  and mbsync will sync this back to the server.  Now, I sometimes do
  have to use the corresponding webmail, and it would be strange if
  messages moved from the Inbox to folders at unexpected times just
  because cron happened to run mbsync.

• mbsync shows a one-line sync status.  I find this reassuring.
  Sometimes, when on a very bad connection for example, the syncing
  process fails and has to restarted.

• I do not risk to interrupt the synchronization process by suspending
  or shutting down the computer.  (Although I believe that mbsync would
  be robust enough to handle this gracefully).

I guess that some advanced IMAP syncing daemon could be written (or
perhaps it exists).  But this setup works well enough for me.

> 2. Also, is it somehow better to connect to dovecot on demand through
>
> (setq my-nnimap-shell-program ...)
>
> rather than use native IMAP support in GNUS?

In the latter case the local dovecot would have to run continuously.
But probably this would be better anyway, see
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnus-english/2021-09/msg00007.html

I haven’t yet found the time to convert my setup.

Christoph