Project dream

[John J. Lee]

Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> writes:

> hwlgw at hotmail.com (Will Stuyvesant) writes:
> > What would your favorite be?
> 
> A CVS-like system for email.  You'd receive all your messages on a
> server somewhere.  You'd then be able to connect your laptop to the
> internet, download ("check out") your mail, and read and reply to it
> offline (not necessarily all of it).  When you dial up again, the
> replies get sent out and stored ("checked in") on the server, the
> messages that you read get marked as read, the ones you didn't read
> don't get marked, etc.  The CVS-like aspect is that you can do the
> same thing from your office computer, your friend's computer, etc., so
> you have the same messages checked out on multiple clients at the same
> time.  The server automatically merges the "change sets" when you
> check any in.  Finally, the server shouldn't need any special protocol
> to check messages in or out.  It should be able to create a single
> tarball or zipfile that you download, and accept a single tarball or
> zipfile when you upload

As Michael says, you're pretty much describing disconnected IMAP.  I'm
pretty sure it's supposed to handle multiple concurrent connections to
one account & mailbox well, but it doesn't have CVS-like merge
facilities -- I don't think I'd really want that, anyway.

In reality, though, disconnected operation seems to be poorly
implemented.  At least, in Mulberry 2.x (or was in 3.x beta?), which
is supposed to be an exemplary IMAP client implementation, it didn't
really work for me (and Mulberry seems over-stuffed with features).
Maybe it does with the current 3.x releases, it's been over a year
since I tried it.  Also, KDE's MUA (KMail?) is just getting support
for disconnected IMAP now, but I'm sure it'll be a while before it
actually works.  Also, I've found it to be a pain to get MUAs working
with IMAP servers (mostly using pine, which again is supposed to be a
good IMAP implementation) -- I guess this is because the protocol has
too many knobs and dials for its own good.  fastmail.fm has mostly
been very good (but one one-day outage during the recent power
failures in US, and another one before that -- I think they've
probably learned from that, though), very clueful and extremely good
value for money (one-off 15 USD payment when I joined, with quite
enough bandwith and storage for someone who has been subscribed to ten
or so mailing lists in the past, and gets a lot of spam, and I think
that price is still current).

If anybody knows of a free disconnected IMAP client that works
(especially in Python :-), please let me know!


John