I am once again trying to solve Problems with Email using technology.

Tilde Lowengrimm

I am once again trying to solve Problems with Email using technology. I am destined to fail because email problems are social problems. So adding technology just leaves me with two problems.

Nevertheless. I would like to store archived mail on my own hard drive, in an easily-accessed, portable format — like a maildir. Then I should be able to copy, move, access, archive, sync, whatever, using regular tools which interact with files. Ideally all the mail clients I use could just work with a maildir directly, but as you may be aware… kids these days… get off my lawn &c. &c. So I think that the practical compromise would be to run a little local IMAP server which just serves to read and write to the maildir in my home directory.

My question for the lazy/indie/fedi-hivemind is this: what’s the safest, smallest, simplest tool I can run to speak maildir to my filesystem and IMAP to my mail client? (And, implied: why is all of this the absolutely wrong way to go about this?)

I feel a little guilty asking a question like this at 5pm on a Friday; I worry that I’m going to nerdsnipe someone’s entire evening. Well, someone else’s, at least.

Tarah Wheeler 🖖♦️

@tilde following thread to lazy-snipe someone else for same problem.

Kevin Riggle

@Tarah @tilde I think that offlineimap is what you’re looking for here, clients speak Maildir to the filesystem and the offlineimap daemon syncs it using IMAP. It works pretty great tho

The Doctor

@tilde I used to run Courier-IMAP for that.