Re: Failing to reproduce file hierarchy locally

[Andy Schofield <ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Asheesh Laroia wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, Andy Schofield wrote:
> 
>>> What I do is I run Dovecot locally as well as remotely.  So I have 
>>> e.g. Evolution talk to the local Dovecot.
>>>
>>> That way I get the benefits of Dovecot like its indexes.  I recommend 
>>> doing that - also, that means you can be sure that you can have many 
>>> multiple local clients accessing the Maildirs over IMAP.
>>
>> Yes - I wondered about that. However my concern here is the issue of 
>> local caching. As far as I can see whenever a client gets an email 
>> message off an IMAP server it caches a local copy to reduce network 
>> traffic in case you look at the email again. However with a local 
>> server that is completely redundant and you will end up with two 
>> copies of every email on every client (one in ~/Maildir, and one 
>> wherever the client chooses to cache it).
> 
> I use alpine, which does not do local caching.  Evolution and 
> Thunderbird cache headers but don't necessarily cache full messages; 
> they only do that if you use "offline mode" as I understand things.
> 
I have now done some experiments with thunderbird. It does not cache the 
messages - just headers and some sort of index file when you are not in 
"offline mode" - so this is perfect. I will look into alpine.

>> I had a couple of goes at this before sending the email to the list. 
>> Trouble is I don't speak python and am not completely clear on the 
>> required syntax of the nametrans command...
> 
> Ask again if you still need a hand with this and I'll help.

You have been a great help and I am basically reproducing your setup 
now: I am using offlineimap with your custom python script to generate a 
maildir++ format copy locally which I then manipulate using a local 
dovecot server. I found using offlineimap to do imap to imap 
synchronization far too slow to be usable - hence using your python 
files. I have written a bash script which then copies (with hard links) 
the maildir++ folders to MH format so that when I am using windows I can 
still use the archive in readonly mode with sylpheed.

Thanks again
Andy