Summary: I want to know if there's any way I can get mutt's IMAP support to suck slightly less. Go to the "Meat" section of the mail unless you're interested in why offlineimap isn't the solution in this case.
--- Background --- The reason for this background is so that I don't get "use offlineimap, mutt's IMAP sucks!" as a response. It's good advice, but I've already taken it. I've recently joined the converted and rather than attempting to use mutt to contact a remote IMAP server, I'm using offlineimap to sync the IMAP folders to local maildirs. offlineimap is an excellent tool, and assuming that you have the disk space to maintain a second full copy of your remote mail, works work. However... A particular remote server of mine uses mboxes and UW-imap as the IMAP server. Occasionally, rather than read the offlineimap copy locally, I want to log into the remote server and use mutt there (normally because I want to attach a file that's on the remote server). I was originally pointing the remote mutt straight at my mail spool and the ~/.imap directory as the folder, which works fine (mutt is good with mboxes). However, bypassing UW-imap like this has the undesirable sideeffect of confusing UW-imap the next time the mailboxes are accessed, and causing it to change the UID of the folder. Then offlineimap refuses to sync that folder, and I need to delete a bunch of caches to get it working again (see the "UID validity problem for folder" section in the manual at http://www.quux.org:70/devel/gopher/Downloads/LiveSource/offlineimap/manual.html ). For the reason why offlineimap does this, see http://article.gmane.org/gmane.mail.imap.offlineimap.general/140 --- Meat --- In order to avoid UW-imap getting confused about UIDs, when I log into the remote server to check my mail, I can't get mutt to read the mboxes directly, I need to get it to read the mailboxes through the mail server. Which brings me right back to the "mutt's IMAP support sucks!" issue. In particular, it takes forever (for values of forever that are about 30secs for a 20kB mail folder) to open IMAP mailboxes, even though (or perhaps because?) I'm getting it to use a preauth tunnel. It also has long delays in scrolling through messages. Now, I can see two non-feasible solutions: 1. Don't use UW-imap It's not my server :) 2. Use offlineimap even though I'm already logged into the remote host. This would be a good solution if it wasn't for my disk quota on the remote host. But the real question is: are there any workarounds for mutt's IMAP support. I don't care about folder searching, speedy folder changes or anything like that, but fast reads and writes over a local connection is something I'd rather like. -Mary -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
