IMAP sync tool (rsync for IMAP)

[Simon Matter]

> 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)

For RedHat/Fedora (not blessed by apt/deb by default), I'm maintaining
offlineimap src rpms here http://www.invoca.ch/pub/packages/offlineimap/
which can be built using
rpmbuild --rebuild offlineimap-4.x.xx-x.src.rpm

The same is true for imapsync here
http://www.invoca.ch/pub/packages/imapsync/

Simon