I thought I would update folks on what I have done and solicit feedback as
indicated.
On 21/01/31 09:16PM, boB Stepp wrote:
1) I eventually want to migrate all of my Gmail to ProtonMail. I will
probably never entirely get rid of Gmail...
Based on previous advice here I am in the process of setting up my local
Mutt infrastructure to be able to handle multiple email accounts. My local
mail file structure is now:
~
/ Mail
/ Gmail
/ Archive
/ Drafts
/ Inbox
/ Sent
/ Spam
/ Trash
/ ProtonMail
Contents are Maildir format. I have eliminated all of the labeling/nested
labeling I had applied to my Gmail account and reduced the IMAP
accessibility to only see the above labels with the caveat that "Archive"
is on the Gmail side "All Mail". I hope I don't regret the labeling
removal!
Today's task is to understand and install/configure "notmuch" to search
through this locally stored mail.
2) I would like to remove all email storage from the cloud, that is,
whether Gmail or ProtonMail, ...
For now I am abandoning this goal as it was pointed out that I might want
to access certain archived emails from my phone or some other device
outside of my PC. I still wonder, though, if I should pare down what is
stored in the Gmail cloud to the absolute minimum necessary, but retain the
full archive on my PC? But this may be too hard and time-intensive and
would appear to violate the bidirectional syncing between my PC and Gmail.
3) I would like my local storage of my emails to allow for me to store
certain content types in sensible folders...
Hopefully "notmuch" will make this goal unnecessary.
4) I would like to be able to quickly search through all locally stored
emails...
"notmuch"
5) I would like to be able to auto-backup locally stored emails on my PC
to another hard drive on my local network. I guess this would be
facilitated by a sensible organization of my PC's email storage?
Remains to be implemented. The above folder structure should make this
trivial to accomplish.
Using the above folder structure I have installed isync/mbsync and msmtp.
Both programs can easily handle multiple email accounts. Currently I only
have Gmail setup, but once I have worked out all of the details, I will add
my ProtonMail account and start the transition from Gmail to ProtonMail.
I have setup a crontab job (My first ever!) to run mbsync every five
minutes. Mutt checks the local mail much more frequently. Probably should
make this a similar time interval to the crontab interval. I was concerned
that if there were to be a network interruption or when my router reboots
at 3 AM that mbsync would hang, but after one day of this it did not. I do
have a question about this though.
The original crontab command to run was:
killall mbsync &>/dev/null; /usr/bin/mbsync -a -qq
The thought was that if mbsync hung up due to a connectivity issue then the
"killall mbsync" would solve this and reissue the command afresh. But I
could never get this to work. When I checked my crontab logs I saw:
Feb 8 01:35:01 Dream-Machine1 CRON[612121]: (bob) CMD (killall mbsync
&>/dev/null; /usr/bin/mbsync -a -qq )
Feb 8 01:35:01 Dream-Machine1 CRON[612119]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed,
discarding output)
I never got this to work and I do not understand why it does not work. Can
anyone shed any light on this?
So I changed the command to:
mbsync -a -qq
and everything has been working. I was curious as to what would happen at
3 AM when my router would reboot. I got:
Feb 8 03:00:01 Dream-Machine1 CRON[614314]: (bob) CMD (mbsync -a -qq )
Feb 8 03:00:24 Dream-Machine1 CRON[614312]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed,
discarding output)
Hmm. The same "No MTA installed, discarding output" as with the originally
worded command. More information, but I still do not see why this message
is generated.
Anyway, so far, results-wise, I am extremely pleased with the improved
responsiveness of Mutt. I thought Mutt was fast when it was doing all of
the IMAP/smtp stuff itself. Now it is crazy instantaneous access to the
local mail stores! Really like it!!
One concern based on earlier discussion in this thread. I am now using
msmtp as my MTA client. What will happen if I send an email when, for
whatever reason, Gmail connectivity is broken? Will it get resent? Will I
get a notification? I do not understand msmtp well enough (yet) to answer
this. I suppose I could experiment and disconnect from my network, send an
email and see what happens...
Now on to "notmuch" and see what I can do about searching through my
currently unlabeled/untagged email store.
Any further guidance is always both solicited and welcome! Thanks for all
of the help to date.
--
Wishing you only the best,
boB Stepp
