I wondered if it's possible to get the Snarf plugin back, if not in the official Dovecot distribution, then at least to somehow build the plugin source on a modern release...because:
Though the documented purpose for Snarf was to ease migration off of UW-IMAP, that's not the only thing it was useful for. Unfortunately, every mailreader that I've seen that can run within Emacs -- and I've tried Gnus, VM, and RMAIL -- all _require_ the use of a ~/mbox file when pulling from a local mail spool on the same machine. (This does not affect IMAP usage of those mailreaders, only local file access.)
Non-Emacs mailreaders like Alpine and Mutt have sufficiently robust file-locking safety that they can work on the local mail spool in /var/spool/mail or /var/mail or what have you directly without copying your mail somewhere else first, so for Alpine and Mutt, use of ~/mbox is possible but not necessary. But it seems that for every mailreader that does run within Emacs, if the mail source is local rather than IMAP, there is no other way to operate the program than to have it copy your mail from the spool to ~/mbox. On a system where there are users who sometimes work that way, doing local mail access in Emacs, and other times use IMAP via Dovecot, you have a mess without the Snarf plugin.
I realize this is a peculiar situation, so I don't expect Snarf to necessarily be put back into Dovecot. I was wondering how it might be possible to build it today though...for any out there who may use Emacs for mail most of the time...but occasionally also want Dovecot IMAP on the same machine where they're normally using an ~/mbox file for Emacs' sake. UW-IMAP may be dead...but long live GNU Emacs!
--
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- Sr. UNIX Systems Admin + banging on a million typewriters will
- University of Chicago + eventually reproduce the entire works of
- James Franck Institute + Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet,
- Materials Research Ctr + we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky