On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 01:29:24PM -0400, Brandon McCaig wrote: > I have briefly tried mutt+IMAP with G-mail, but haven't used it > enough to get comfortable with it. What I do know is that the > current setup that I have is unusable due to the size of my G-mail > mailbox. I started to setup OfflineIMAP, but I don't remember if I > ever started using it or not... I digress.
I ran into a similar problem using mutt to access Gmail via IMAP. The large size of my inbox made access times extremely slow. As a fix, I set mutt's header_cache and message_cachedir variables in my .muttrc file like so. set header_cache = "~/.mutt/cache/headers" set message_cachedir = "~/.mutt/cache/bodies" This sped things up a bit but not enough to make things usable. So I've adapted the way I use my inbox and now I periodically delete any messages in my inbox older than two weeks. This keeps my inbox pretty lean but still retains messages long enough that can usually preserve the context of lengthy mailing list threads. I've found that with Gmail at least, deleting messages from your inbox doesn't actually erase anything. A copy of every message is retained and is accessible from the "[Gmail]/All Mail" IMAP folder. I believe messages need to be explicitly moved to [Gmail]/Trash before Gmail will actually delete them. This setup requires only a Gmail account and mutt it's pretty easy to get up and running. The fact that my connection to Gmail will time out seemingly at random is frustrating, and so far this is really the only major annoyance I've encountered. Perhaps mutt has a configuration setting that can keep the connection alive. I will have to poke around and see if I can make the problem disappear. > I have been using fetchmail + procmail to fetch and sort mail (I've > been using mbox mailboxes, somewhat arbitrarily). I use mutt to read > and manage mailboxes, and compose messages. I use msmtp to send mail > from mutt. :) I have a macro bound to G that executes fetchmail to > fetch new mail. Periodically (often whenever I get a free moment to > look at mutt) I manually type G. I have found that it works > sufficiently well for my current needs, though there is certainly > room for improvement. > > All of my rc files are available in my public GitHub repo: > > https://github.com/bamccaig/rc/ > git://github.com/bamccaig/rc.git > > .fetchmailrc > .muttrc > .msmtprc > [.netrc] > .procmailrc > > In order to be able to track them publicly like that I keep > credentials (i.e., passwords) separately in a .netrc file. There is > a template in the repo that you can use if you're unfamiliar with > it. As a general rule, you want most of these files to have > restricted privileges (e.g., 0600) so nobody else on the system can > read [or write] them. > > As always, if you spot something in that repo that shouldn't be > public then please let me know. :) I also want to toy around with fetchmail, procmail, and the like, mostly for my own curiosity. Being able to poke around someone else's setup will really help me in putting all the pieces together; this is much appreciated! -- Lewis
