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