Re: OfflineIMAP + Wanderlust

[David Wallin <david.wallin@xxxxx>]

Hi John,

At Wed, 17 May 2006 18:09:42 -0500,
John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, May 17, 2006 at 11:06:08PM +0100, David Wallin wrote:
> 
> First, a quick question.  From reading the description of WL, it seems
> it is designed specifically for IMAP users and has an offline cache
> mode.  So why are you even bothering with OfflineIMAP? ;-)

True, WL is very IMAP friendly, and your question is justified. At the time, 
the IMAP server only allowed a certain amount of mail to be stored on it, so I 
wanted to keep a local backup of mails, stored in some useful/portable format.
My reasoning probably makes less sense these days as the limit on the IMAP 
server seem to have vanished. 

Still, WL seemed faster on the maildir compared to the IMAP server so I kept 
using it, though it might make sense to reevaluate this decision. I still want 
to keep a local backup of my mail in maildir, but maybe access should be done 
through IMAP.

> 
> Second, an option.  You could run a local IMAP server and point both
> OfflineIMAP and WL to it.
> 

This was one thing I wanted to experiment with, and I tried Dovecot, as it was 
recommended to me, but I had trouble setting it up against the Maildir 
structure used by OfflineIMAP. I think maybe using OfflineIMAP as a IMAP to 
IMAP synchroniser would make sense ?


> > I sync emails from an IMAP server (hence the use of OfflineIMAP).  New
> > mails end up in .INBOX on my local machine, WL then sorts the mails
> > into .INBOX.foo, .INBOX.bar and so forth. 
> 
> Really, this sort of filtering should happen on the server if possible.
> 

I'm not sure that's possible.

> > When WL moves a mail from .INBOX to .INBOX.foo, it renames the file.
> 
> That ideally would not happen, but it doesn't hurt anything.
> 
> 
> OfflineIMAP will actually issue a delete command to the server and then
> re-upload the message in the new folder, but the effect is the same.
> 

Ok

> > This causes a problem when I edit a message and offlineimap runs in
> > the background. Since this message is renamed during the time I write
> > my reply, WL gets confused when it tries to set the 'Answer' flag on
> > the original email.
> 
> I'd say that's a bug in WL -- all sorts of things in Maildirs are based
> on filenames, including flags...  it sounds like simply pulling up the
> folder in mutt could cause it problems...
> 

The problem occurs because I run Offlineimap as a cronjob, and the filename 
could change while I edit the reply. I don't see how WL could work any 
different in this case. 
However, if WL didn't rename the files in the first place, things would work 
fine, but I don't think it's likely that WLs behaviour will change.

[...]

thanks,

--david.