The email geekery continues this weekend.

After using Mutt with Gmail’s IMAP for the past week or so, I’m finally getting comfortable again. It’s been a long time, but Mutt is just really fast and fun to use, once everything is configured nicely. The slow link in the chain now is the network lag when accessing IMAP mailboxes remotely. To work around that, I configured OfflineIMAP and it’s now syncing all of my Gmail locally.

This is great because it kills another bird: Archiving. I don’t know about you, but I get a little twitchy thinking about all of my emails sitting out there on Gmails servers, just waiting for some excuse to prevent me from getting to them. With OfflineIMAP running, every single one of those emails becomes a text file on my local machine. I find that comforting.

Once it’s done syncing I’ll be able to access everything locally using Mutt, and have every change made reflected back up to Gmail. There are a few stray gotchas still in my way, like dealing with Gmail’s annoying Priority Inbox handling, and the All Mail duplicate problem, but I have some ideas there that I will try once things are running smoothly.

A few links to pages that helped me through this process…

http://offlineimap.org/
http://pbrisbin.com/posts/mutt_gmail_offlineimap
http://www.h4ck3r.net/2011/03/13/gmail-backup-imap/