Modest email sync reliability using offlineimap and dovecot
 

Hi guys,

I've been "playing" with different approaches in order to get a reliable email solution, as Modest client isn't that good...

Beside several GUI issues, main problem seems to be sync reliability (doesn't sync every time it's supposed to). I first gave a try with mutt, accessing a gmail account (more than 13000 emails). It's basically unusable, as it requires lots of network connections while browsing/reading emails. And if no network at all, account can't be reached, so you can't read emails when offline.

I then installed offlineimap, a nice, reliable and fast tool to synchronize imap accounts and maildirs. I created a task using Alarmed to activate this sync every 15 minutes. This works nice, I can read my emails with mutt. Though mutt is great, it's not integrated to N900 contacts for instance. And HTML emails are poorly handled. I wanted to use Modest to access maildir, but it just doesn't handle this mail box type, only pop and imap.

So I installed an IMAP server on N900, dovecot. The idea is to use Modest to access a local IMAP server (so hopefully no network problems, and fast). So far it works !

- offlineimap syncs between remote imap and local maildir
- alarmed launches offlineimap every 15min
- dovecot serves the maildir content
- Modest points to this dovecot local IMAP installation

This sounds complicated, and it may be, but it seems to me that it's getting more reliable. I need to test this for several days.

This has required lots of tinkering, this just doesn't work out of the box (read: lots of command line...), I can write a tutorial if interested

Cheers,
Seb

Re: Modest email sync reliability using offlineimap and dovecot
 

Hi Seb,

i'm really interested, especially the part dovecot and modest integration,
The combination offlineimap, mutt i'm using too with fcron for my private and encryted messages.
Would like to use your offlineimap, dovecot, modest combination for work email.
Thanks so far.

Regards, davall

Re: Modest email sync reliability using offlineimap and dovecot
 

This will work great for gmail. Is there anything similar to offlineimap for POP accounts? I need something for my hotmail/yahoo emails.

Thanks and great work so far. Looking forward to the tutorial.

Re: Modest email sync reliability using offlineimap and dovecot
 

getmail 4.17 should work with pop3, but did not test it.

Re: Modest email sync reliability using offlineimap and dovecot
 

You could use fetchmail or, as mentioned, getmail. There's no 2-ways sync using POP, so the process is easier than syncing an IMAP account.

Cheers,
Seb

Re: Modest email sync reliability using offlineimap and dovecot
 

getmail sounds nice, "getmail is designed to replace other mail retrievers such as fetchmail". I used fetchmail but never tried this one. It can retrieve emails from IMAP account, but from what I understand, it cannot sync in both ways. That's no luck, I could have use it as one tool to access all email accounts.

Cheers,
Seb

Re: Modest email sync reliability using offlineimap and dovecot
 

Hi guys,

I've started to write a tutorial on wiki section:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Improving_Mode...nc_reliability

I wanted to attach my deb files, but it's not allowed. Could someone point me to some directions to where I could upload them ?

TIA
Cheers,
Seb

Re: Modest email sync reliability using offlineimap and dovecot
 

You can attach your .deb files in this very thread. In your #1 post would be perfect..

Re: Modest email sync reliability using offlineimap and dovecot
 

This is driving me crazy... Max size for deb files is 488KB, I need to upload 2.1M for mutt and 3.9M for dovecot...

Any hints ?

Re: Modest email sync reliability using offlineimap and dovecot
 

OK, I've uploaded them on a dropbox account, and update wiki page. You'll find links to my deb packages at the end.

Let me know if you face any troubles.

Cheers,
Seb