Imapgoose
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
whynothugo.nlTechstory
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ImapEmail ClientsOpen-Source Software
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Imap
Email Clients
Open-Source Software
ImapGoose is a new open-source tool that provides efficient IMAP synchronization, sparking discussion on its potential use cases and comparisons to existing solutions.
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Oct 15, 2025 at 6:28 PM EDT
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Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
It's better to have a local cyrus running and connect to it by imap, with, say, gnus.
So what happens if you lose your connection to the server? How do you get up to date with the current state?
It's separation of concerns, the monitor only checks that something has changed, while mbsync does the synchronisation.
Password: 2025/10/16 15:43:03 Connecting to imap.gmail.com:993... 2025/10/16 15:43:03 Connected successfully 2025/10/16 15:43:03 Logging in as user@gmail.com... 2025/10/16 15:43:03 Logged in successfully 2025/10/16 15:43:03 Server capabilities: 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - ENABLE 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - APPENDLIMIT=35651584 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - IDLE 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - NAMESPACE 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - ID 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - XLIST 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - UIDPLUS 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - ESEARCH 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - UTF8=ACCEPT 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - CHILDREN 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - CONDSTORE 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - LIST-EXTENDED 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - LITERAL- 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - UNSELECT 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - QUOTA 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - MOVE 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - LIST-STATUS 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - SPECIAL-USE 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - IMAP4rev1 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - X-GM-EXT-1 2025/10/16 15:43:03 - COMPRESS=DEFLATE
Checking for required capabilities: UIDPLUS: SUPPORTED NOTIFY: NOT SUPPORTED CONDSTORE: SUPPORTED QRESYNC: NOT SUPPORTED
Some required capabilities are missing
In order to synchronise with this kind of server, you need to list UIDs and Flags from all mailboxes and perform a full comparison of which items changed. There's no NOTIFY, so you need to do this periodically.
This requires substantially more network and processing, and an entirely different application design. Such a design cannot immediately synchronise new entries either.
ImapGoose doesn't cover this kind of scenario, there are plenty of existing tools that can synchronise legacy servers already.
{ description = "IMAP to Maildir synchronization tool";
The problem with IDLE is that you need a separate connection for each mailbox. So if you want all email in sync, you need N connections for N mailboxes. Plus separate connections to do the actual syncing, because IDLE takes makes a connection unusable for anything else. Or need to compromise in that some (most) mailboxes will be "polled" ever M minutes.
Fortunately, all of the email providers to which I have access support the required capabilities. Consider asking your service provider to upgrade; the newest standard required by ImapGoose was standardised in 2009.
Anyone tried it?
I'm currently doing remote work from a location with an instable connection. Naturally I expected mails to work well in an async fashion, but instead... everything is really janky and I'm always unsure whether actions like moving an mail to a different actually 'went through' without loosing any mails.