A viable mutt

I'm sure many of the long-time readers of D-U are familiar with my many
rants against the horridness that is mutt. I prefer my email client GUI. I
prefer it to do its own transport. I prefer that it handle multiple accounts
sanely. IE, I prefer all things mutt is not. However, this is not one of
those rants. No. This is a message which is composed in the spirit of
fairness.

One of the many faults I find with mutt is its IMAP implementation. In
two words, it fails. Copying individual messages from the current folder to
any other folder, especially trash, by downloading the message and then
uploading it back to the server over the IMAP connection instead of issuing an
IMAP copy operation is horribly slow and inefficient.

Recently, however, I started using mutt extensively. I did this by SSHing
into my server. It was fine but because I am overworking that server every
time vim needed to load it would swap like mad. I needed to run mutt locally
which meant imap. Something which is obvious I did not want to do.

Enter a tool which made mutt viable for my needs, mbsync (debian package -
isync). It is a tool which syncronizes a local Maildir folder with a remote
imap folder. In essence it is a local imap cache. Mutt's failings as an imap
client are masked since all of its operations are local. mbsync is in my
crontab syncronizing the local cache with the remote folders once every 5
minutes.

I am not sure if issues an imap copy/del to move items to the trash
folder or if it reuploads the messages but, really, since it is syncing once
every 5 minutes and is doing it asyncronously from what mutt is doing the
impact of it doing it improperly is far less than Mutt's full locking
operation.

With that one glaring wart hidden I have to say that I've upgraded mutt to
"viable" again. I still don't like having to search for my new mail. And
since I'm going to have ssmtp or nullmailer installed on these machines anyway
having mutt use them is tolerable. The lack of multi-account functionality is
somethiing I can do without since, really, that's not something I have
personally needed for a few years. So this time around I haven't run
screaming from the portions of mutt I do like (list-replies, vim as an
editor).

So, if you're a D-U reader like me who constantly pick at the scab that is
mutt, trying to make it work, and one of the reasons is its imap
implementation. Give mbsync a whirl. It might just be the band-aid you need.
;)

--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 1FC01004 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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