On 2019-01-16 9:21 a.m., Carlos E. R. wrote:
The goal is to keep laptop and desktop machine dovecot accounts in sync, in both directions. Even better, two laptops and one desktop.
I do something like this, but two portable Androids and the desktop. I have no problems with it. Any change to any one of the couple of dozen IMAP accounts I use is available to the other devices. The downside is that on the Android devices the mail app I use -- K@, a development from K9 -- needs to be told to rescan manually. Setting the rescan period to 'automatic' for less than some longer period, an hour say, places too much demand on the batter for wifi/DATA use. This works for me because I am using IMAP as IMAP. You are not. You are using it is a bastardized form of POP. Ultimately, you could read IMAP mail from a 'memory-less' device , or one that has simply transmission and display buffers (rather like a camera without a storage card). You are asking the 'get out of that without changing anything' question. Ask this question on an IMAP forum and they will point out that you are really doing POP. One device is 'stealing' all the mail. Now to be fair: I do have some POP accounts out there, legacy, on the wild internet, from days of your and ISPs that are meanies. The way I accommodate this is to have my PC run fetchmail to suck them into my Dovecot server. ONLY those accounts! The dovecot server is accessible as an IMAP server on my LAN for my PC and wifi for my Android devices. Off site there is a high port routed though my NAT gateway. TLS and IMAP-S used of course. The important point is that *all* the devices only ever use real IMAP. Real IMAP accounts will handle reads and updates from more than one source. As I say, by using imapsync you are really using POP over an IMAP port. You could do the same with Fetchmail or one of its equivalents like 'getmail'. When run in pure IMAP mode, readers like K9/K@, Thunderbird and so on, SHOULD just ask for batches of headers and message count. Unlike POP, the IMAP protocol permits this 'view/list headers only' mode, and when you do eventually view the body there is no implicit delete of the message as there is with POP. Now to be fair, for performance reasons, these readers cache results. I can read a few messages on my IMAP account with Thunderbird, then pull the Ethernet plug. Or restart my machine. T'Bird remembers the headers and may have cached any message I've visited (provided I haven't set the flush cash on close flag). But this is about caching, not about downloading. IMAP does not download&delete like POP does. IMAP does not delete unless and until you tell your mail reader to do so. In Thunderbird you can tag for delete and you can also remove the tag before you sync/"Compact". I'm short, what I'm saying is this: Stop using imapsync, stop using your IMAP accounts as if they were POP accounts. Use them as IMAP accounts. make you ISP do the work. That's what the IMAP protocol is for. Yes, I have a phone and a tablet (and about to get another table, so I'll have 4 devices accessing my mail accounts) as well s my PC rather than laptops, but in terms of what goes over the wire, my ISP can't see the difference. Ultimately, I leave too much there, one of my IMAP accounts has nearly 100MB of stuff. However that is full of messages from people who insist on sending HTML mail composed with Microsoft and which has embedded images. This account has a modest 2MB for a couple of years of back-messages. Once I delete the messages with embedded images :-) -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org