Using Mutt with Gmail

This article is about setting up a computer to fetch from Gmail and store the messages locally without using IMAP. You don't want to use mutt's built-in IMAP support because it has to load a message (if it hasn't already been read) each time you to move to the next one. So rather than being able to zip through 1000 new messages in a mailing list every night without any delays, you have to sit there waiting a half second for each one to load as you read. Doesn't sound like much until you realize that's adding 10 minutes to a routine that would otherwise take about 20 or 30.

The setup shown in linked article is ok. But there's a better way.

http://wiki.github.com/jgoerzen/offlineimap/

Creates a maildir from an IMAP account. Syncs read/unread, new messages, IMAP folder moves both ways. Supports filtering, renaming/mapping, and more. Has a special Gmail mode. I run mine on a cron job to pull new mail from various accounts every few hours, and then go through all of my mail once every couple of days when I feel like it.

I can run it on multiple computers to keep them all in sync. Unread/read status is correct and synched across multiple machines, messages aren't deleted from the server when you fetch them, reading messages is super fast, I can still use other IMAP clients if I want (like GUI clients, or my phone). Love it to death.

It's not updated very frequently anymore (at all?) but it still seems to work. You can also check out http://linux.die.net/man/1/mbsync which I've been meaning to try switching to, so that I don't need Python for anything anymore.

For the people out there who live in Emacs - Give Emacs + Wanderlust a try. It has a nice imap implementation, you can prefetch the mail, work offline, have multiple imap accounts etc.

Previously I was using Mutt + offlineimap

seems overly complicated. why not just have mutt connect directly to google's imap servers over ssl? with header and message caching enabled, switching between mailboxes is plenty fast against most imap servers.