Re: Gnus and local mirroring

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> You could use the gnus agent to keep a local copy of your email and
>> search that (or offlineimap, and probably others)
>
> This is the aspect that I think needs work in Gnus: the "normal" way to
> work with IMAP should be to keep a local mirror, but the gnus-agent only
> keeps a partial mirror (hence not good enough for search, for example),
> and offline-imap requires significant extra manual work (and was not
> even really well supported by Gnus last time I tried, because if your
> local mirror uses maildir, Gnus didn't store the whole metadata in the
> Maildir but keeps some in its .newsrc.eld or something like that, so
> other clients connecting to the IMAP search aren't told the whole
> story).

Wouldn't this require writing an IMAP server in Elisp? Or I suppose Gnus
could keep the messages in a local maildir, and then do double
operations on the local maildir and the remote server? I don't know what
this would look like, and it sounds fairly difficult.

I agree that Gnus doesn't need to keep its own set of marks in
.newsrc.eld for IMAP servers, it's mostly redundant and prone to sync
errors.