Mail plumbing #
Starting position #
- self-hosted IMAP service [1] since time began (called "origin" hereon)
- the mash of MUAs across platforms is not great: Thunderbird, Roundcube, iOS Mail, ...
- only Thunderbird has a decent stab at multiple identities, yet there's no iOS version
- on mobile, iOS Mail is integrated but has amazingly terrible search
- third party iOS MUAs each have their own kinks, and often when they say IMAP support they mean "for these specific providers"
- I have Fastmail account [2], it collects mail from origin over IMAP into Fastmail-land and leaves it undeleted at origin
- hooray, good desktop and mobile MUA: multiple identities, notifications, JMAP is fast
- but mail piles up at origin, regardless of filing, deletion, preening at Fastmail. who wants to do that twice (or even once!)
End position #
- use Sieve at origin to deliver all mail into a subfolder of the IMAP account rather than the INBOX (Dovecot)
- create a dedicated user whose inbox is this subfolder but otherwise doesn't receive or save mail (Dovecot)
- Fastmail uses this user to collect mail
- happy times using Fastmail's MUAs
- cron-driven
offlineimapat origin syncs the Fastmail inbox with origin's real inbox - Thunderbird etc now see the same inbox as Fastmail including filing, deletion, etc, and changes sync both ways
- still can check inbound mail before Fastmail gets involved (useful for contingency, debugging)
Commentary #
It's a little baroque but gets the job done. And what else to do at 5am Saturday morning.
Footnotes #
[1] Not wholly my sentiments but You should not run your mail server because mail is hard tracks somewhat
[2] Disclosure: former employee
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