Re: backup and synchronize to fastmail

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 13 May 2008 7:46:56 pm Asheesh Laroia wrote:
> On Tue, 13 May 2008, John Goerzen wrote:
> > On Tuesday 13 May 2008 6:10:41 pm Alejandro Jakubi wrote:
> >> In addition to answers to my previous questions, I need explanations
> >> about these issues:
> >>
> >> 1. Sorting. My guess is that inmediatelly after runing offlineimap for
> >> the first time, there will be a period of transfer (ie backup) from my
> >> folders on my departmental account to my fastmail account. Will the
> >> order of the messages in my departmental account folders be preserved
> >> in this process? I am worried about this because of my experience with
> >> mailutil (from the Pine toolbox) which, apparently depending on the
> >> version of the imap server, keep or alter this order on copy or move.
> >
> > Maildir does not have a defined storage order.  The order of display is
> > defined by your mail agent.  IMAP also does not have a defined storage
> > order.  There is no way to enforce this.
>
> Typicall, (al)pine sorts by the "arrival time" of messages.  With Maildir,
> that's usually the file modification time.
>
> You can sort by "Sent time" ("sent date"?) which requires trusting the
> "Date:" header in the email itself.

OfflineIMAP does make a valiant effort to preserve INTERNALDATE across IMAP 
servers, which is how this gets represented, I believe.   So the data should 
be preserved.  And as you say, the presentation of the sort order is up to 
the mail reader.