Snarf plugin retirement

[John Stoffel]

>>>>> "Brent" == Brent Busby <brent at jfi.uchicago.edu> writes:

Brent> I wondered if it's possible to get the Snarf plugin back, if not in the
Brent> official Dovecot distribution, then at least to somehow build the plugin
Brent> source on a modern release...because:

Brent> Though the documented purpose for Snarf was to ease migration
Brent> off of UW-IMAP, that's not the only thing it was useful for.
Brent> Unfortunately, every mailreader that I've seen that can run
Brent> within Emacs -- and I've tried Gnus, VM, and RMAIL -- all
Brent> _require_ the use of a ~/mbox file when pulling from a local
Brent> mail spool on the same machine.  (This does not affect IMAP
Brent> usage of those mailreaders, only local file access.)

I'm confused... since I'm using VM to read and write these emails, I'm
trying to understand your issue.  Basically, when I moved to IMAP for
my personal domain, I made the concious choice to only allow IMAP
access, since I wanted proper locking from both Phones, mutt, and
other IMAP clients.  So I had to stop using local email spools to get
email.

So if you're offering IMAP access to mail, just turn off the local
mail spool completely. 

Brent> Non-Emacs mailreaders like Alpine and Mutt have sufficiently
Brent> robust file-locking safety that they can work on the local mail
Brent> spool in /var/spool/mail or /var/mail or what have you directly
Brent> without copying your mail somewhere else first, so for Alpine
Brent> and Mutt, use of ~/mbox is possible but not necessary.  But it
Brent> seems that for every mailreader that does run within Emacs, if
Brent> the mail source is local rather than IMAP, there is no other
Brent> way to operate the program than to have it copy your mail from
Brent> the spool to ~/mbox.  On a system where there are users who
Brent> sometimes work that way, doing local mail access in Emacs, and
Brent> other times use IMAP via Dovecot, you have a mess without the
Brent> Snarf plugin.

You have a mess period.  Don't do this.  It's a really bad idea and
trying to make it work is just too painful.  Now I *do* use a mix of
IMAP and local mbox format folders, where once I save it locally via
mbox, I can't acces those folders using my IMAP only clients.  But
that's an accepted and known limitation.

Brent> I realize this is a peculiar situation, so I don't expect Snarf
Brent> to necessarily be put back into Dovecot.  I was wondering how
Brent> it might be possible to build it today though...for any out
Brent> there who may use Emacs for mail most of the time...but
Brent> occasionally also want Dovecot IMAP on the same machine where
Brent> they're normally using an ~/mbox file for Emacs' sake.  UW-IMAP
Brent> may be dead...but long live GNU Emacs!

Just don't use VM without IMAP as your main mailbox any more.  And
also accept that once you get over a thousand or so emails, or lots of
large emails, then VM inside emacs really starts to suck.

I'd move to Mutt, but I haven't spent the time to re-create the VM
keybindings in mutt yet, which is what's holding me back.

And if you have users who want both types of access, just tell them
no.  It's *not* worth the hassle, and things *will* break.

John