[neomutt-users] Future proofed mail environment

Guillaume Brogi gui-gui at netcourrier.com
Sun Nov 5 22:58:49 CET 2017


On Fri, Nov 03, 2017 at 02:51:15PM +0100, juh wrote:
> Hi all,
Hi!

> after using several mail clients in the last few years I came back to
> mutt/neomutt. Years ago I was happy with mutt using fetchmail and pop3.
> Now with my imap accounts I see that the network is slowing things down.
> 
> So I considered to look into options such as offlineimap to have a local
> copy of my accounts. I am also interested in a mail search solution such
> as notmuch which AFAICS only works with local maildir folders.
> 
> At the same time I am looking for a good solution to archive mail. As I
> said before I used quite a lot of different clients and I have mail
> backups in different formats. I could convert them to a consolidated
> format such as maildir if needed.
> 
> How would you consolidate your mail environment?
> 
> Is it a good idea to use offlineimap with mutt?
> Or should I use isync?
offlineimap and isync basically do the same thing. I'm not sure if one
is recommended over the other. Offlineimap used to be slow and
unreliable, but it's not the case anymore.
The main difference I see is that offlineimap has hooks, so it's easy to
run notmuch new after fetching new emails, while with isync, you have to
write a script calling isync and then notmuch.
The other big difference is that offlineimap can keep the connection
open and periodically fetch new mail. You can also send it a USR1 signal
to get it to fetch new mail now.

> How can I archive mail with and without syncing it to the imap server?
I don't do any archiving for now, sorry.

> Is notmuch the best indexing and search solution?
It's basically the only solution other than the search and tagging
already inside neomutt. It's supposed to be more powerful and faster
with regard to searches including tags.

> I would like to have all emails in one interface so that I can search in
> current mail folders which are synced to the server reaching back eg.
> for three years and in local archive folders with older mails at the
> same time.
> 
> And a last question. One of my imap account stores all mails pgp
> encrypted. Is it possible to
> decrypt these mails after download with offlineimap so that notmuch can
> index the content?
There is a patch, but it hasn't been merged yet (at least, it wasn't the
last time I looked). If you use IRC, you should jump into #notmuch and
ask dkg about it. I think that if enough people are interested, it would
help the patch getting merged.
With the patch, you call `notmuch new --try-decrypt` and notmuch will
index decrypted messages if it can decrypt them.

> Or would you recommend a imap only solution?
> 

Hope that helped.

-- 
Guillaume
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