syncing mail by simply syncing the filesystem

[Christoph Groth <cwg@falma.de>]

Dear notmuch hackers and users,

After 10 years of using Gnus I am considering to replace it with
notmuch.  On this occasion I would also like to make my e-mail-setup
distributed in a way which does not require any central infrastructure,
i.e. I would like to be able to read and write e-mail on several
computers without relying on a central IMAP server.

The ideal setup would be one which would allow to use any of my
computers independently (for example when I'm away with my laptop).
When necessary, the local mail stores would be synchronized by simply
syncing the home directory (I'm using unison for this).

Does anyone have a working setup like this?  I'm grateful for any tips
and ideas.

Alternatively, if syncing using solely the file system does not work, I
could setup dovecot on one of my machines and use it as a central IMAP
server.  On the clients I imagine a setup where mail would be fetched by
fetchmail, handed over to procmail which would put it into the local
maildir.  This maildir would be synchronized with the IMAP server by
offlineimap.  Any experiences with a setup like this?

Thanks,
Christoph