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26 Responses to “Geek: How to use offlineimap and the dovecot mail server to read your Gmail in Emacs efficiently”

1. rlazo // May 9, 2008 at 12:14 am

   This is what I’ve been looking for! Now everything works perfectly. Thank you very much Sacha

2. Jan Van lent // May 9, 2008 at 2:28 pm

   I recently created a very similar setup. I also use the following to start offlineimap from within emacs.

   
(define-key gnus-group-mode-map (kbd "vo")
'(lambda ()
(interactive)
(shell-command "offlineimap&" "*offlineimap*" nil)))


3. Don Marti // May 9, 2008 at 2:36 pm

   Why not just use a local Maildir folder instead of having to set up an IMAP server? I do something similar but just point my MUA at ~/Maildir

4. Sacha Chua // May 10, 2008 at 4:11 pm

   You’re welcome! I’m glad it works for you.

5. Kamal Al-Marhoobi // May 12, 2008 at 2:59 pm

   Thanks Sacha. I’d recently got offlineimap and dovecot out of darwinports for exactly this purpose, but had not got around to the setup. I’ll try sorting this out when I get home today.

6. Kamal Al-Marhoobi // May 12, 2008 at 3:00 pm

   I believe this has something to do with gnus and large Maildir directories. I recall reading that this can be bad.

7. ... // May 13, 2008 at 10:41 pm

   i’m writing a maildir mode for gnus that can work off the straight mailfolders. i’ll post it here when its done.

   -hhh

8. brad // Jun 11, 2008 at 4:04 pm

   This was very helpful. Since you are not using gmail’s smtp server I assume you are not relying on gmail to save copies of your sent mail. So, how are you keeping copies of your sent items. I’m using gnus with dovecot on a local machine and I’m having a devil of a time getting anythign I send to be save locally. All I can get working, by using gcc-self, is a copy in my INBOX rather then in my Sent Items.

9. tim // Jun 23, 2008 at 12:58 pm

   Looks like the dovecot configuration has changed a bit in recent versions (I’m using version 1.0.10)

   The config file is now /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf

   The default_mail_env option is now called mail_location.

10. Yuval Kogman // Jul 13, 2008 at 3:52 am

    offlineimap supports the ‘Gmail’ type, so you don’t need all that extra fluff (ssl, the host, maxconnections etc).

    Also, I like to add

    folderfilter = lambda foldername: foldername not in ['[Gmail]/All Mail’]

    Cheers

11. James Cash // Jul 14, 2008 at 8:22 pm

    This looks really neat…I’ve been trying to move away from Thunderbird to Emacs + gnus + bbdb for my email, so this is very useful.

    One problem I’m having though…After offlineimap synchronizes and dovecot is running, I can’t seem to actually see the group. I do M-x gnus, ^ to the groups buffer, but when I try to select the nnimap:Mail group, it just says “nnimap: Generating active list for Mail…” forever (that is, until Emacs freezes).

    Oddly enough, if I hit C-g at just the right time, I can see the list of folders/labels, but that only works occasionally.

    If I access the dovecot server with Thunderbird/Icedove, it works fine.

    Any advice?

12. Zak B. Elep // Jul 20, 2008 at 11:02 pm

    I’ve used this setup way back last year, using offlineimap to retrieve messages from my spunge.org mail and serving them up locally via dovecot. Its a bit Rube Goldberg-ish as it basically makes use of IMAP as POP++ then IMAP again, so when I got to the point where I had 500/1000+ messages coming to me per day, I had to quit it. Nowadays I’m coming back to Gnus and using nnimap to connect directly to my IMAP servers instead (I wish No Gnus imports Wanderlust’s IMAP library as an alternative nnimap backend soon, though…)

13. Surely it can’t be so hard to be a better (Emacs and Docbook) geek? « Alec the Geek // Oct 28, 2008 at 7:40 pm

    [...] 29/Aug/08: Sacha Chua has some great advice to share on using Gnus for [...]

14. Joe Bloggs // Dec 15, 2008 at 10:57 pm

    Thanks for the great tip, I can now read my gmail in gnus. However.. I have several other online email accounts I also want to sync. I read that I need to specify seperate directories for each account to offlineimap, but how do I set up dovecot for this?

15. Henrik // Mar 8, 2009 at 11:55 am

    If you want to avoid being queried about your local password at all. the local repository section should look like this:

    [Repository Local]
    type = IMAP
    preauthtunnel = /usr/sbin/dovecot –exec-mail imap

    That way, offlineimap talks directly to the dovecot program instead of via a network connection.

    Similarily, in .gnus.el you can do the following:

    (setq imap-shell-program “/usr/sbin/dovecot –exec-mail imap”)
    gnus-secondary-select-methods
    ‘((nnimap “Mail”
    (nnimap-stream shell))))

    and you won’t be quieried for a password in Gnus either.

16. Dave Abrahams // Apr 5, 2009 at 6:59 am

    @Henrik — I think WordPress may have messed with your posting. Should be

    preauthtunnel = /usr/sbin/dovecot --exec-mail imap

    and

    (setq imap-shell-program "/usr/sbin/dovecot --exec-mail imap")

    Note the pairs of dashes before exec-mail, everyone.

    @Sacha — Also, aside from using paths under /opt/local for my Macports installation of dovecot, I had to open up read access to dovecot.conf, or I was only able to run offlineimap as root… or is that actually OK?

17. Dave Abrahams // Apr 5, 2009 at 8:12 am

    @Don Marti –

    That’s a good question; why not? I’m not sure what one gains by using a local dovecot. Maybe if you also want to use something like AppleMail or Thunderbird, which doesn’t read Maildir directly?

    Note to Mac users: if you want to use the curses UI for offlineimap, you may need to install py25-curses and make the fix described here: http://trac.macports.org/ticket/14017

18. Sacha Chua // Apr 5, 2009 at 9:28 am

    Don, Dave: I was having weird problems with using Maildir directly, for some reason. =) Maybe if I set it up again, things will be better.

19. Dave Abrahams // May 5, 2009 at 5:51 am

    Note to MacOS / macports users: these instructions won’t work unless you also set

    passdb pam {
    args = login
    }

    in /opt/local/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf. See https://trac.macports.org/ticket/19545

20. Dave Abrahams // May 23, 2009 at 11:37 pm

    Having an awful time getting this to work through the shell on a Mac: http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2009-May/039765.html

    If anyone else as succeeded, please let me know!

21. Dave Abrahams // May 24, 2009 at 6:56 pm

    Mac shell issue solved:

    port install dovecot configure.args=–with-ioloop=select

22. Sacha Chua // May 24, 2009 at 11:30 pm

    Awesome, congrats! Thanks for sharing! =D

23. Jeremy // Jul 9, 2009 at 6:35 am

    The reason you want to use a local IMAP server with Gnus is because direct access to the maildir using built in Gnus functionality can block you out of emacs during reads of large amounts of mail. This is because emacs is single threaded and the read of the mail has to take over all of emacs – you can’t switch buffers or type or whatever during Gnus’ read of the maildir.

    So instead you delegate the task to an external process, and Gnus just checks periodically to find out when it’s done. That way you’re not blocked out of emacs.

    That’s my understanding of why a local IMAP server is preferable to just using the built-in Maildir functions in Gnus.

24. Bjoern // Aug 29, 2009 at 10:20 am

    I hope some people still read this comments and maybe someone can help me.

    I use exactly the same setup for my Debian Lenny system:
    local dovecot imap server; offlineimap; Gnus

    But I have one problem. After running offlineimap the new mails in my local imap server are shown as “unread” but not as “new”.

    Does someone has the same problem?
    Any idea how to solve it?

    Thanks!

25. Matt // Aug 30, 2009 at 7:21 pm

    Has anybody used the offlineimap/dovecot method to server up mail for *multiple* accounts? I have a gmail account plus several others. I’d like to read them all in gnus via the offlineimap/dovecot pipe.

    But how can I get dovecot to server up multiple maildir folders (eg ~/Maildir-accnt1 ~/Maildir-acctn2)?

26. Joe Bloggs // Aug 31, 2009 at 12:48 pm

    Yes it can be done, read up on virtual users on the Dovecot wiki:

    http://wiki.dovecot.org/VirtualUsers

    From what I remember it’s just a case of adding some users to /etc/dovecot/passwd and using “%u” at the end of your “mail_location” entry in dovecot.conf, e.g:

    mail_location = maildir:/home/email/MailDir/%u

    This will create seperate folders for each user under the /home/email/MailDir/ directory