Who has the perfect IMAP setup?
February 27th, 2009 | Published in Dear Lazyweb | 7 Comments
Well, here I am, fiddling with my email still! I have been using GMail with IMAP now for about a year because a) I was to lazy to setup my own IMAP server again and b) GMail has decent spam filtering, email filtering, and the labels stuff. Plus it is nice when I can’t get access to one of my machines to fire up Mutt, I can just hit the web browser, though that hasn’t happened to me yet.
I spent quite a bit of yesterday and today fiddling around with some things that my buddy Greg posted about a month ago. See, I have had Mutt doing the generic IMAP thing with GMail and it works fairly well. The downfall is how slow it is. See, I get quite a bit of email, probably to much to be honest. Mutt + GMail grabs the emails just fine, but for some reason when I am going through my list of about 5,000 or so, scrolling is painfull. So I setup Greg’s way from his post, or similar to it. This helped tremendously, but I still am not all that happy with it. For some reason, the application offlineimap creates funny named folders for the [GMAIL] stuff. I used the patched Mutt so I have my nice little folder bar on the left. With the new folder names locally, my folder bar is a mess unless I widen it. Doing this tends to kill off a lot of the threads as they grow deeper and deeper.
Anyways, enough of that stuff. What I am looking for is the perfect IMAP setup. I just need the IMAP portion for email, as I use my ISP for SMTP. What is the perfect IMAP setup in your opinion?
February 27th, 2009 at 03:18:13 (#)
Hi,
I use the same email configuration as you. (offlineimap + mutt-patched). I have configured 4 accounts and at the beginning I has the same problem -> too long folder names. You can shorten/filter the names using the ‘nametrans’ or ‘folderfilter’ options in .offlineimaprc . For the gmail account I have configurred the following:
nametrans = lambda foldername: re.sub(‘ ‘, ‘_’, re.sub(‘^Mail/’, ”, foldername))
other examples are:
folderfilter = lambda foldername: re.search(‘(^INBOX$|^Mail/|^postponed|^Sent)’, foldername)
nametrans = lambda foldername: re.sub(‘ ‘, ‘_’, re.sub(‘^Mail/’, ”, foldername))
Hope you find this usefull.
Salut!
February 27th, 2009 at 03:32:49 (#)
You didn’t say if you’re using mbox or Maildir format, and in my experience that matters a _lot_. Basically, when mbox files become large, everything slows to a crawl, whereas Maildir just remains snappy.
February 27th, 2009 at 03:54:37 (#)
I run my own postfix + dovecot + spamassassin + procmail combo for mail, and apart from the initial setup and the odd new rule in my procmailrc, I never touch it. I use the same postfix server for (authenticated, secure) outbound SSL so I never have to bother about ‘local’ SMTP servers.
Client side I use a mixture of iPhone Mail (best mobile mail client I’ve seen, and excellent IMAP support), Roundcube, and the jewel in the crown: Claws. This has by far the best IMAP support of any MUA I’ve used, and I’ve tried lots.
For I while I was into the whole offlineimap + mutt thing, but I never got it quite to my satisfaction and ended up going back to Claws.
February 27th, 2009 at 04:00:44 (#)
@ guilopo - I will take a look at that and see if that will satisfy my taste. Thanks!
@mok0 - Maildir.
@schwuk - I am a KDE user, so I think what I have available GUI wise that is very similar to Claws is Mailody. I had used it in the past with KDE 3 and it was rock solid and very fast. As for your server setup, sounds very similar to my old setup. I have just been to lazy recently (3 years almost) on setting a new system up
Maybe it is high time to go back to that route, definitely because I get a ton of email while I sleep 
February 27th, 2009 at 06:24:08 (#)
I use a postfix + cyrus combo on my box (and we have that at work too), and I’m quite happy with it, especially with cyrus’ folder layout
Just watch out with cyrus’ default Debian configuration, one of the security things is miscommented there — in the manual it says something else and that’s what it actually indeed does (at least this was the case in Hardy). I remember it having to do with only allowing TLS logins for IMAP or so.
Anyway, I still also use GMail, though it is indeed a bit slow compared to the cyruses.
February 27th, 2009 at 11:42:18 (#)
IMAP on Evolution works well and it is very fast…..for Gmail it is the best…
February 28th, 2009 at 07:18:29 (#)
I use just plain cyrus 2.2. No direct access to the folders, everything has to go through IMAP - and that is _rock solid_. fetchmail & sieve-script gets my mail from my provider, and sorts everything beautifully. It fails gracefully if quota or filesystem are full. (I have yet to loose a single mail due to cyrus.)
fetchnews pulls the newsgroups I’m interested in, and inserts via NNTP (and i can read news via IMAP, so have a server-side \seen flag - invaluable). Shared folders let my other users read the same MLs and newsgroups with just a simple IMAP SUBSCRIBE.
a (still experimental) setup syncs forum posts two-way between a shared folder and the forum software using NNTP. One user inserts RSS feeds into shared folders (not sure with which software).
(I did a one-stop migration to cyrus using offlineimap, and recommend the same - gmail’s IMAP support just seems not good enough for continouus two-way synchronisation, no matter what software you use.)