IMAP sync tool (rsync for IMAP)

[Bron Gondwana]

On Thu, Dec 21, 2006 at 03:47:26PM -0800, Florin Andrei wrote:
> Essentially, I need a tool that I can point at servers A and B and tell 
> it "get all the email from my account on server A to a specific folder 
> on my account on server B, preserving the subfolders hierarchy".
> The tool needs to be smart enough to repeat the operation later on but 
> then it must only transfer the new messages.
> The tool may run on one or the other IMAP servers, or even on a 3rd 
> machine, since it should be network-based. Pretty much all systems are 
> Linux 'round here, some Windows stragglers too.
> 
> Sort of like rsync for IMAP, if that makes sense.
> 
> So far, the only tool I've found is imapsync:
> 
> http://freshmeat.net/projects/imapsync/
> 
> Anyone tried it with Cyrus? Good/bad experiences?
> 
> Are there any other tools that work better with Cyrus?

Another thing you might want to consider is offlineimap:

http://software.complete.org/offlineimap/

It's a pile of multithreaded python, but don't let that put you
off!  I've found it quite robust for IMAP -> Maildir usage (Indeed,
I'm replying to this message via Mutt using local Maildirs which
are kept synchronised with my FastMail (Cyrus 2.3.7+patches) IMAP
account).

Imap <=> Imap usage I found less robust in that it sometimes got
confused when it had been killed in the middle of operations.  If
you didn't keep killing it all the time (my usage patterns were
pretty strange) it was better - and also I think if you had a server
which supports UID PLUS like Cyrus does then it would be safer.
Give it a look though.

apt-get install offlineimap works on pretty much any sane linux
these days :)  (I believe you can even get it with apt4rpm, though
that's not my particular kink)

Regards,

Bron.