sacha chua living an awesome life

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

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.

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

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…)

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.

@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

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

Mac shell issue solved:

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

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.

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)?

I had a problem with the summary buffer showing the wrong subjects for certain messages (entering them would give the right message though). It seems gnus-agent was at fault (or gmail’s interactions with it). http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusGmail#toc11 gave the solution, just disable it for gmail.

Rumour has it that the new Gnus in Emacs 24 is much faster at doing IMAP, so you won’t need this in order to do IMAP mail with, say, Google mail. Might still be useful for offline use, though. =)