Re: backup and synchronize to fastmail

[Alejandro Jakubi <jakubi@xxxxxxxxx>]

> 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.

More precisely, I am using for presentation of folders in Pine this sorting:

sort-key=Arrival/Reverse

ie last arrived on top. In the mbox folders to which I have shell access, the
messages are stored with first arrived on top of the file. And opening them
with Pine I see them as expected with last arrived on top.

The problem that I had when using mailutil to copy or move folders between the
imap server /mail collection and the "local" /mail collection on my shell
account, was that the order of the messages in the mbox folder file was
reversed. Then, always with the same sort-key, these folders opened in Pine
with the wrong order. Later on this problem "magically" disappeared when the
cluster was upgraded to Fedora Core 6 (though another minor problem appeared).

So, my question is whether offlineimap will preserve the order of the messages
in the mbox file. Or whether there is an option that I should set to get it.
I do not know whether "preserve INTERNALDATE" means exactly that.

> What is your definition of debugging then?  I think that its default
> verbosity would be fine for most people.

I understand by debugging exactly what the manual states, a call with option
-d to track for problems. As I have not run offlineimap yet I do not know
about its amount of verbosity in normal operation (ie without option -d). I
understand that we are talking about running it as a process in background, so
my question is also whether a logfile is created by default or it has to be
specified in the command line or in the configuration file (I do not see a
mention in the manual).

> You will likely want to specify a remotepass in both Repositories, lest you
> have to type in an IMAP password twice (and it may not be entirely clear to
> you which password is being asked for).

So you mean writing both passwords in clear text in .offlineimaprc? Note that
this file will reside on my shell account in the departamental cluster, ie a
shared system in a university. I would prefer not to do so and type instead
both passwords when I start offlineimap (I guess and hope that this is the way
that offlineimap may be made to work).

So, if confusion may arise about which password offlineimap is asking me,
could a string be added to the prompt for the passwords?

I guess anyway that these passwords will be asked always in the same order.

> That's really rather broken.  I can think of a way that such a race could
> confuse OfflineIMAP, but it is highly pathological, would not cause any data
> loss, and is so unlikely that I doubt you'd ever see it.

As long as it does not stops the offlineimap process in the background, it is
OK then.

Regards, Alejandro Jakubi