@nobodyinperson I sync 6 different "accounts/mailboxes" (around 800 actual folders) with around 1.a little million mails using mbsync to a local directory. One subdir in there per account. afew to apply sind mass tag changes based on some filters i want. And then notmuch to index and (via its emacs interface) read/ search/ reply/ write/....

Works pretty well. That maildir i get out of this is backed up using some restic, unsure what git would do with the amount of files.

#gitannex #mbsync #mutt #neomutt #supmail #nmail #alpine

Thanks for all the suggestions. Maildir format is the term I was looking for, apparently. I'm not on a journey trying #mbsync. It's amazing so far and works very well with :gitannex: #gitAnnex. The indexing and search is the next step then.

mbsync puts local info like the sync time and the hostname into the Maildir email files. Might make a mess when running mbsync from different PCs. Though git annex will deduplicate it anyway and cleanup shouldn't be too hard.

I am looking for a solution to my email problem. I need a searchable backup system for all my email adresses, preferrably in a format that's (:gitannex: #gitAnnex) sync friendly (e.g. all just .eml files). A terminal-based Thunderbird alternative would also be nice. I see there's #mbsync #mutt #neomutt #supMail #nmail #alpine and so many more but no concise overview with feature comparison. What would you recommend?

@zrzz well sort-of. Running `notmuch new' also runs #mbsync in the pre-new hook, so I just sync both every time. My original plan was to set up an #mcron schedule to just run notmuch new periodically, but I haven't gotten around to it yet and now I'm not sure I will because I do like manually syncing so that any emails that I mark as deleted don't disappear halfway through my email reading session. I sometimes do mark things as deleted that I really shouldn't. Though I still might change my mind

Right so that's me able to read my email offline using #aerc , #mbsync and #pass for storing passwords. Next to look into sending emails when online.

Well #aerc is installed and I have styled it with my fav gruvbox colors. The config / filters are not started / finished as yet as I've moved onto #mbsync . So far so good. Can it really be this easy. See what I did there? I've just set myself up for a fall ! 😂

Right today I'm going to tackle installing and setting up #aerc with #mbsync and #msmtp for offline support. Well that's the plan anyway.

Been playing around with #aerc and as someone who has always used either a GUI email client or webmail it certainly does take some getting used to. I've worked out that I needed the package dante for being able to read some of the HTML emails I've received. I'm currently only using it in online mode so next I need to research #mbsync so I can read emails in offline mode and then I'll probably look into the same for sending via sendmail or whatever ?
Feel free to chip in with your hints and tips.

@cinerion @tomo That'll be an issue with any that uses #Emacs' internal #IMAP support (technically that could be rewritten to be asynchronous and indeed has been for some but meh).

The proper way to avoid that is to instead use another program like #mbsync, #mpop or #offlineimap to synchronize to a directory spool, which you can then use at local filesystem access speeds.

@emory Probably something like this setup: https://jonathanh.co.uk/blog/mutt-setup/ Using #mbsync #msmtp and #davmail That's what I do at least :-)

#DavMail has always been slow (I’m using it with #mbsync to access my work e-mail), but now it has become unbearably slow: what used to take maybe 30 s, now takes 4–5 min. Has anybody else noticed this?

@sqrtminusone That’s interesting, thanks for sharing! I guess I’ll try #OfflineIMAP at some point then. With #DavMail in the loop, the performance difference between #mbsync and OfflineIMAP should be negligible…

@true_mxp I just switched to #OfflineIMAP for use with #DavMail.

But my problem was that my Exchange instance somehow assigned duplicate UIDs to different emails in different folders, so #mbsync just couldn't download a large part of my mail. And OffineIMAP had some way to handle that more gracefully.

Update on my experiences with #DavMail and #mbsync: after a lot of experimentation, it turned out that the problem of unsynced messages occurred with messages above a certain size. Apparently DavMail behaves in a way that differs from other #IMAP servers and that mbsync doesn’t handle well.

I’ve massively increased the size of buf in src/socket.h (from 100000 to 5000000), and this seems to have solved the problem. The real problem is probably in the protocol handling, but this is at least a workaround that allows me to continue reading mail with #mu4e in #Emacs.

I'm trying to look for documentation on using #mbsync with a Google account using OAuth. I'm noticing there are multiple ways to go about it like cyrus-sasl-xoauth2, mailctl and others. I'm wondering what is the most sensible one to try.

@moritz Habe #davmail auf dem MacBook laufen, und da hat es sich gemeldet, als das token abgelaufen ist. Zumindest der teil sollte funktionieren… Mein problem ist vor allem, dass es überhaupt nicht mit #mbsync harmonisiert. Jetzt ist es ein paar tage ohne fehlermeldung gelaufen, aber schon jammert mbsync wieder über volle input buffers :-/ Immerhin fehlen anscheinend noch keine nachrichten … Wenn es zuverlässig funktionieren würde, wäre es auch nicht so schlimm, dass es lahm ist …

@Cnoceda @ericsfraga Yes, exactly, this was my idea as well. Authentication works, and the IMAP proxy server works *in principle*, too. But *in practice*, I couldn’t get #mbsync to reliably work with #davmail’s IMAP proxy; some messages were never synchronized.

@ericsfraga @Cnoceda I use #emacs #mu4e for mail, so I somehow need to get the mail into a maildir.

There are other tools that just do the #OAuth2 authentication (see, e.g., https://sites.uw.edu/bxf4/2022/09/01/getting-uw-outlook-365-oauth2-to-work-with-emacs-mu4e-mbsync-and-msmtp/), but I don’t see how I could create an “Azure Active Directory App,” so this already fails at Step 1… That’s why I tried tunneling #mbsync through #davmail.

@Cnoceda @ericsfraga Unfortunately, my experience so far with #davmail, #mbsync, and #MicrosoftExchange: it’s hopeless.

I’ve tried both mbsync 1.4.4 and the current git version. I thought I had it working when it finally didn’t stop with some error—but then I discovered that hundreds of messages were never synchronized.

This is a disaster.

Bueno, me ha costado un poco pero por fin puedo manejar mi :email: (correo) dentro de #emacs, con #mbsync y #mu4e. Creo que después de #orgmode, #oxhugo, #mastodonEL , #elfeed y #telegraEL ya tengo todo lo que necesito en #emacs