I have come up with an approach that I like. I use fastmail.fm as my email provider. They have two features that are necessary for this approach.
1. I can use IMAP 2. I can configure my account to put mails in the Sent folder when I send them through fastmail's SMTP server. For simplicity, let's say that I have only four folders. +inbox +drafts +local-outbox +real-outbox I configure mbsync to pull from the fastmail IMAP Inbox to a local maildrop without modifying the mails on fastmail. I run inc from the local maildrop, deleting the mail from the local maildrop and incorporating it into the +inbox. (In practice I would really use slocal, &c. and do filtering, but it's the same idea.) mbsync keeps track of which mails have already been synced; on subsequent runs, mbsync downloads and only the new mail and thus incorporates only the new mail into the maildrop. When I send mail, nmh puts a copy in +local-outbox. You'll see soon that this isn't really necessary, but think it is good to do this in case my internet connection drops while I am sending a message. Since I send mail through fastmail's SMTP server, fastmail puts a copy in my remote Sent folder. I use the mbsync process to incorporate this remote Sent mail to the local +real-outbox, just like how incorporate the remote Inbox mail to the local +inbox folder. I skip the +local-outbox folder when I take backups because everything in there should be in the +real-outbox. The main thing that is missing from this is a way to synchronize refilings and drafts. I handle this by refiling only from my desktop computer. I use my laptop computer or the fastmail web interface to check email when I'm not at the desktop computer, but I organize mail and take backups only at the desktop computer. Conveniently, I don't use refile very much, as I have never been into manually categorizing my email. The lack of drafts synchronization is a bit annoying, but the drafts directory is pretty small, so synchronizing just that should be pretty easy. I would probably use duplicity. And, now that I have figured it all out, I might not want to use it any more! For reasons beyond nmh, I'm finding it a bit annoying to maintain two different computers. I'm planning to get a very nice laptop and a docking station and using that as the main computer, instead of switching between the desktop and laptop. When I do this, I may still use the present mbsync strategy so that I can synchronize sent mails between the fastmail web application and the local nmh, and I won't worry about synchronizing drafts. _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
