[sf-lug] thinking of moving to mutt. i use gmail. any advice/warnings/thoughts?

[Akkana Peck]

Michael Shiloh writes:
> I'm considering moving from Thunderbird to Mutt.

> * In addition to my personal Gmail account, both of my part time jobs use
> Gmail so I have 3 Gmail accounts.

When I worked for a company that used Gmail with a custom domain,
I set up a mutt profile to do imap to that account, and once I knew
how to do that I set up another mutt profile to check my own gmail
account. It was easy keeping them separate and worked fine.
I didn't try to go from one to the other in the same mutt session;
I ran mutt -F ~/.mutt/[profilename] separately for each server.

With some IMAP servers and some mutt versions I've had conniptions
trying to get mutt to keep track of new vs. read mail properly,
and went back to POP because it was too frustrating.
But I don't think gmail was one of the problematic servers.

> * Against all conventional wisdom I keep all my mail in my inbox until I've
> done whatever I need to do with it. Then it gets archived. I don't
> subdivide my archive - I found this takes too much time to create and
> maintain. Instead, I depend on good search facilities. Thus, each of my
> accounts really has only 2 folders: inbox and archive.

Mutt doesn't have the search facilities google has, but you can
always go to the website if you want to do a complicated search.
Or use a utility like grepmail locally, since you say you have a
local copy anyway.

> * I keep a local copy of all email on my laptop. I do a lot of work offline
> and I depend on having access to both the inbox and archive for all 3 of my
> accounts. On the other hand, I do not delete mail from the Gmail server,
> since I sometimes depend on having access to it when I'm not at my laptop.

How do you make the local copy?  I've used offlineimap (maildir) and
mailsync (mbox) to archive IMAP mail locally, but neither package
seemed particularly well maintained and there were some issues here
and there. That was a long time ago and the state of the art might
be better now.

If you're keeping a local copy anyway, you'll probably find that
mutt works better (certainly it will be a lot faster) on the local
copy instead of talking to the IMAP server. But then you need
something that can synchronize the changes back up to the server.

> * My local email folders are in Thunderbird format. I believe I read
> somewhere that converters exist, although I haven't verified that the Mutt
> format (whatever that is)  is supported.

Unless something has changed, Thunderbird uses use mbox, just like
mutt uses by default. You should be able to run mutt -f on any local
Thunderbird folders without doing anything extra. Thunderbird also
keeps some indexing files (.msf or something?) in parallel with the
mbox files, but those are just for T'bird to keep track of where you
left off in the folder -- mutt doesn't need that information.

If you want to use maildir (which might make sense given that your
inbox and archive files are probably huge), mutt can do that too,
but you'll have to use an mbox to maildir converter.

        ...Akkana