Comment by mapgrep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mapgrep | Hacker News Reader

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I have personally found that as you get serious about keeping your own archive of email you need something like fetchmail, but not fetchmail.

I used getmail for years and it is solid. duckerude posted this elsewhere in the thread, where the author of getmail rants a bit about fetchmail. http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/faq.html#faq-about-why

Once I left Gmail I was interested in something faster and more efficient, because I was using the transfer tool for more than just backup, it became the main way I receive email on my machine. Then the mail gets indexed (for text search) by another program and displayed by a third.

Anyway I found mbsync, which is just this amazing, efficient, very solid transfer program that's been around for many years just quietly doing its job. I almost wrote it off because its homepage is on sourceforge but if you poke around a bit you'll see it is actively developed, there's an active mailing list, etc. I love it. It's kind of interesting how this project I had never heard of just does its job well and works and the program by the semi-famous software pundit whose programming essay went viral really does not (from what I have heard).

fetchmail can run as a daemon and fetch from imap with IDLE. As far as I can tell, mbsync doesn't do this.

I haven't found a single other program that does this well; there are tools to sync entire directory trees that can idle, but they don't seem to support "download everything and delete it" the way fetchmail does.

Many e-mail services throttle new connections, so it's not the difference between getting your mail now and 1 minute from now, it's the difference between getting your mail now and 5-10 minutes from now.

[edit]

Another thing keeping me on fetchmail; I have all my filters setup with maildrop. Most other programs want to deliver to a local folder directly. Maybe there's a way around this?

Same here (like another sibling reply). I really don't get the complaints.

For private email consolidation, I've been running fetchmail for probably 20+ years now without any hiccups or complaints whatsoever. I haven't had to touch my Fetchmail+Postfix+Maildrop setup in like 15+ years, except for the postfix part in the sense that nobody accepts emails from dialup IPs any longer, so everything I _send_ goes through the proper mail server, instead of my own.

My actual email provider (that I've also used for 20+ years, i.e. no, it's definitely not and never will be GMail) does throttle connections via POP3 or IMAP to 3 connections per 5 minutes. That's completely fine. I really don't care whether I get an email now or in 5 minutes from now. I check it way less often than that and I do definitely _not_ have notifications turned on for my email client. And when I do care (coz you know, some "2FA" BS email, I check via my provider's app or log into my server and start a `fetchmail`.

I just got started with mbsync and am having several issues with Gmail and Outlook.com. These are old accounts and I do have well-behaved IMAP emails from smaller hosts, but it would be nice to manage everything with mbsync. Trashing emails in mu4e and then syncing results in them being deleted from my local [Gmail]/Trash while they somehow remain in the remote. I thought Outlook.com would be fine considering they use more standard folders rather than the tagging system which seems to result in duplicates, but I have the same issues there. This is with Expunge None, which I expect would leave emails alone until the server empties them from the Trash.

The bizarre thing is that no one online seems to have these issues? The mbsync configs for Gmail just seem to work for people, or something. I do have auto-expunge turned off in Gmail, so I’m kind of at my wit’s end with it. It’s a shame because it is an amazing program. It synced 10,000 emails without a hitch. I only started getting issues when I tried to sync from my maildir to the IMAP store.

I’ve only run mbsync unidirectionally as a backup utility (in addition to tarsnap on my Mailserver). I wonder if the bidirectional features just aren’t used that much?

Also, Gmail’s tags don’t map nicely onto folders.

For posterity, Expunge Both fixed my issues. I also had issues with accounts other than Gmail auto-expunging messages marked with the Trash flag, so I had to tweak mu4e a bit to only move deleted messages to the Trash folder without also flagging them.

I use a fdm + s-nail combo. I know I can use s-nail over imap, but this way I am sure I always have my mail available.

I've used fetchmail for years to get email from IMAP inboxes (mainly Exchange server) and never had a single problem with it. Was surprised to see that there are major complaints.

Most of the usage complaints seem to be when using fetchmail to send off to another smtp server, not for just downloading mail.

There are also complaints about it being insecure and of low code quality, but those seem to rarely be the main complaint.

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