MUA's vs. local mail

[Ivan Shmakov <ivan@gray.siamics.net>]

>>>>> Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> writes:

[…]

 > I do know many of the GUI MUAs are incomplete jack-jobs that fail to
 > add a handler for local system folders (i.e. were only partially
 > ported to Linux).  I am not sure which would be the better aproach to
 > deal with this deficiency.

	Recommends: dovecot-imapd, and let the MUA's use imap://[::1]/
	by default?

	Please also note that dovecot-imapd is perfectly runnable even
	without special privileges, and even without a real network
	socket (a pipe is just fine.)  In particular, my Gnus/Emacs
	setup has the following server's definition:

(nnimap "Maildir"
        (nnimap-stream shell)
        ;; FIXME: use nnimap-shell-program here
        (imap-shell-program
         ("MAIL=maildir:\"$HOME\"/Maildir /usr/lib/dovecot/imap")))

	That way, Gnus is also unaware of my system's password.

	Contrary to having a MUA access local mail directly, Dovecot
	will cache certain headers, thus allowing the list of messages
	to be prepared rather quickly.  For the larger mailboxes, there
	may be a really huge difference between using Maildir + Dovecot
	vs. a MUA that accesses a Unix mbox file directly.

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