Re: [Nmh-workers] IMAP, again

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Oct 24, 2013, at 11:35 AM, Joel Uckelman <address@hidden> wrote:

> I looked this over a bit and wasn't able to satisfy myself as to what
> OfflineIMAP would do.

For many years now my primary email engine has been IMAP.  The driving force 
behind this is that I need to access my mail folders from a wide range of 
systems in many locations.  The role MH plays in my life is in local enclaves 
where I have small clusters of machines that exist (mostly) in isolation.  
E.g., on my network here on the boat I use MH to handle all the internal mail 
traffic.  But anything going outside that domain inevitably goes through an 
IMAP client, if only so that a copy of my outbound mail gets saved in the 
outbox folder on my IMAP server.

Something like offlineimap could change all of that.  A local MH view of my 
IMAP server would be a godsend in many ways.  And for me, the manual sync model 
actually fits very well with how I do things.

The big question I have is: how well does offlineimap handle merge conflicts 
between >2 competing offline clients?  This is *not* an easy problem to solve.

That said, I'm going to take the code for a run and see how it does.  If I 
can't break it with some >2 clients accessing tests, it could be worth looking 
at adding MH folder support.  Teaching offlineimap about MH folders is 
guaranteed to be less painful than teaching MH about IMAP.

--lyndon