gmail -> offlineimap -> (local imap) -> alpine (under Ubuntu)

[Tim Gray]

On Nov 1, 2011, at 4:22 PM, Chris Barrington-Leigh wrote:
> To clarify my own post, what I described is actually not my ideal outcome. I would rather keep the existing maildir folder that offlineimap made and has been using for years. What would then be best is if a local imap server could mediate between that and alpine. So it would look more like this:
> 
> gmail -> offlineimap -> maildir -> (local imap) -> alpine
> 
> This may be something like
> 
> http://blob.inf.ed.ac.uk/gdutton/2009/01/offlineimap/
> 
> but these instructions are both too complex for me and are for a Mac.


I haven't used alpine for a long time.  I used to use it (and pine before that), but then about 4 years ago, I transitioned to mutt.  Once I got things tweaked right, I was happier with mutt then I ever was with alpine.  Not to start a war or anything, but mutt reads maildir just fine.  I used it with offlineimap for the past four years.

I chose maildir for the exact reason you are alluding to: if I ever decided to change mail clients again, I could just run a local imap server on my existing maildirs and just serve my messages to the new client that way, assuming they didn't read maildir directly.  Just this week I started testing this out (again) with dovecot and OS X Mail.  It works very nice.  Dovecot is relatively easy to set up.