Gnus, Dovecot, OfflineIMAP
This is a followup, effectively, to Roland Mas’ article Gnus, Dovecot, OfflineIMAP, search: a HOWTO .
I went thru Roland’s HOWTO, and have a few comments on variances that I noticed:
- I first installed OfflineIMAP; this worked pretty much fine as described. I didn’t bother adding the extra Python code for propagating Gnus expiry material, as I generally don’t use it.
- I had a couple problems setting up Dovecot:
- By default, Dovecot uses Maildir++ folder handling, which isn’t consistent with how OfflineIMAP stores folders.There’s an additional option needed to cope with this:
mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:LAYOUT=fs
- Perhaps because of the above, I couldn’t readily get Gnus to talk over a pipe to a Dovecot process.Not a big deal – I have Gnus speak to Dovecot via talking to the socket, which is the usual thing one would do with Dovecot anyways.
- By default, Dovecot uses Maildir++ folder handling, which isn’t consistent with how OfflineIMAP stores folders.There’s an additional option needed to cope with this:
- It seems to me as though Gnus should be able to talk directly to Maildir. It does, after all, have a protocol for it (nnmaildir).I couldn’t struggle my way thru the Gnus documentation to properly set up a virtual server for nnmaildir to do this.
This would be pretty valuable in that it would eliminate the need for Dovecot altogether. Perhaps it’s a documentation problem that nobody seems to know how to do this.