<DKIM> Is OfflineIMAP right for my use case?

[Robert Wolf]

On Sun, 24 Jul 2016, Nicolas Sebrecht wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 23, 2016 at 01:06:12PM +0200, Mike Murdoch wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> 
> Hi,
> 
> > I've been trying to find solutions to ease my Email management for a
> > while now. OfflineIMAP looks promising, but before I start setting
> > things up, I'm wondering if it is even the right thing to use.
> > 
> > Current setup:
> > - A couple of different Email accounts with different providers
> > - Different devices (email clients) in different networks that should
> > have access to all accounts
> > - A home server
> > 
> > Requirements:
> > - Grab Email from the provider a soon as possible, leave nothing behind
> > (i.e. POP3 principle, delete from server)
> > - Still allow synchronization of mail between clients
> > - Make setup of a new client easier (don't want to add 10 accounts to
> > each new device)
> 
> I've never tried something like that. I think it's possible to get
> something near to what to aim, though. Here's my idea:


Hello,

I have exactly this setup. I have some gmail.com, atlas.cz and seznam.cz mails. 
I have setup offline IMAP with name translation to store all different 
mailboxes to different subfolder of my private mailbox on my private server 
running dovecot. I use alpine and gmail and atlas are somehow IMAP-incompatible 
(gmail reports sometimes rfc822.size equal 0 and alpine re-reads email 
repeatedly and it takes long time, and the atlas has active instant delete - if 
I mark message delete, it will disappear without expunge).

So I sync my mailboxes including subfolders from the different providers to one 
mailbox.


But IMHO you don't need offlineimap, if you want to delete emails on receiving 
mail server. Just forward incoming emails to your mail server, make some rules 
to store incoming mails to different folders according to recipient email 
address.


> > A remaining issue is how to handle outgoing mail. If I have everything
> > going through the proxy, how do I tell it which account to ultimately
> > send with? And I *do* want to be able to send via any account.

*** Many email clients support different identities. In Alpine I can set 
different Roles with different From address. In Thunderbird you can set 
different identities with different From address and different Sent-Items 
folder. And then you can simply choose the identity by sending.

The other question is, over which server you send such an email. In my case, I 
use my server with postfix configured for relay smtp in case of sender 
@gmail.com (gmail has SPF), and sending directly for atlas.cz.

In Thunderbird, you can have multiple SMTP Servers defined and you can define 
for every identity different SMTP server. So for @gmail.com identity (address) 
you can define smtp.gmail.com server, for other identity other server or your 
own smtp server.


If you don't like setting up many mail accounts on different machines, you can 
create template profile in thunderbird and then copy this template only. 
You can update only this template and then copy to different machines to update 
the settings on different hosts.



(again) BUT IMHO you don't need to setup your own single server, just to 
configure template profile in Thunderbird with all your accounts and then only 
copy this template profile on other machines and connect to installed 
thunderbird. Then you have many accounts defined in thunderbird, but management 
is still easy in one template, and installation is easy too.



Regards,

Robert Wolf.