[Dovecot] dovecot and unison

[dm-list-email-dovecot at scs.stanford.edu]

At Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:02:17 -0400,
FZiegler wrote:
> 
> I am successfully using dovecot purely as a personal local mail store on 
> my desktop. (There is only one account, and it's only ever accessed by 
> local mail clients on the machine. The point is to have a common store I 
> can use with any client; plus, I prefer dovecot's Mailbox storage to 
> Thunderbird's mboxes.)
> 
> Now I'd like if possible, to replicate this setup on my laptop and keep 
> both in sync with unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/), 
> which I am already using to sync much of my home dir about once a day.
> 
> I found at least one positive message regarding this topic 
> (http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2010-April/048092.html), but I feel I 
> could use some more advice.

I have a similar setup, but I use offlineimap instead of unison:

	http://offlineimap.org/

It seems to work pretty well.  That's not to say that unison wouldn't
work as well also.  However, offlineimap has the advantage that it
doesn't restrict you to a star topology.  You can, for instance, since
to your laptop at work and from your laptop at home.

Note that offlineimap is slow if you don't use imap at both ends.
Therefore, I use it on the local end.  A simplified excerpt of my
.offlineimaprc looks like this:

========

[general]
accounts = DefaultAccount

[Account DefaultAccount]
localrepository = MyLocal
remoterepository = MyRemote

[Repository MyRemote]
type = IMAP
preauthtunnel = ssh -qax -oBatchMode=yes -oServerAliveInterval=60 MY-MAIL-SERVER 'exec env CONFIG_FILE=/PATH/TO/PRIVATE/dovecot.conf /usr/lib/dovecot/imap'

[Repository MyLocal]
type = IMAP
preauthtunnel = CONFIG_FILE=$HOME/etc/dovecot.conf /usr/lib/dovecot/imap

========

Unfortunately, in dovecot 2.1, the full text search no longer seems to
work in pre-auth mode, but I don't think that has anything to do with
offlineimap.  I think maybe dovecot is deprecating pre-auth mode or
requires a more complicated setup.