Arch Linux

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,356

IMAP server to serve maildir from offlineimap?

Hi all,

I've been using (and loving) offlineimap to download my gmail to my machine. This originally stemmed from frustration with thunderbird and evolution's finicky ways of dealing with IMAP and offline storage of messages. The offlineimap part of this is fully setup and useable.

Currently, I'm using evolution to directly access the maildir store which offlineimap handles. This has worked well, except for the case where I'm copying files from another mail account in evolution to the maildir account, where the file naming system evo uses doesn't seem to play well with offlineimap.

I was wondering whether setting up my own IMAP server to serve my maildir would help, in this situation. I want to try it out, but I'm confused on the difference/merits between courier IMAP, dovecot, and cyrus IMAP. Even our own wiki only has an article on courier-MTA, which is far beyond what I'm trying to do.

Anyway, the question is relatively simple, which would you recommend from courier, dovecot, and cyrus? Corrolary to that is which works best with offlineimap specifically?

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Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.
jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.
Griemak-Bleeding edge, not bleeding flat. Edge denotes falls will occur from time to time. Bring your own parachute.

Profjim

Member

From: NYC

Registered: 2008-03-24

Posts: 658

Re: IMAP server to serve maildir from offlineimap?

I don't really know but would be glad to hear your experiences. My mail hosting service is www.fastmail.fm, they are pretty knowledgeable and they use cyrus. I realize that's not much.

EDIT: here are some links.

Last edited by Profjim (2009-08-25 18:08:08)

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,356

Re: IMAP server to serve maildir from offlineimap?

Hi Profjim, thanks for your response. I settled on dovecot (was advised elsewhere that its easy, which correlates extremely well with my laziness quotient) and haven't been having problems so far. Well, except that their ML has pretty high traffic and is a pain to read through evolution...

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Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.
jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.
Griemak-Bleeding edge, not bleeding flat. Edge denotes falls will occur from time to time. Bring your own parachute.

Profjim

Member

From: NYC

Registered: 2008-03-24

Posts: 658

Re: IMAP server to serve maildir from offlineimap?

good, thanks for your report

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,356

Re: IMAP server to serve maildir from offlineimap?

Nice thing about dovecot is it NEVER turns up in my top 5 by CPU/memory list in conky. Its like its not even there, honestly, conky takes more CPU, and my memory list is dominated by firefox/compiz/evo. This may be the case with the other candidates as well, but this is the only one I've tried, and it did everything I wanted.

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Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.
jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.
Griemak-Bleeding edge, not bleeding flat. Edge denotes falls will occur from time to time. Bring your own parachute.