Hi,
during the last week my Internet service was a little slow, and Evolution just did not give me the kind of performance that I expected accessing my IMAP Folder. This brought up the idea that ideally I would also like to work with my email in IMAP even when offline. And that the changes should be synced up on reconnect using something like rsync, such that only the changes are transferred, and a full copy of the mailbox is kept at both the client and the server. However, rsync is generally a oneway solution, and only works on unix-filesystems. There are imap-sync tools available alternatively though.
And for full duplex file syncronization, unison would be an alternative solution though. It requires manual intervention for conflict resolution however. This, and the wonderful Article on “ZFS snapshot visualization in GNOME“, led me to also consider revision control such as git, svn, cvs or darcs for folders. Or mail folders in specific.
IMAP is actually nothing more than a remote filesystem for Mail. Why a specific protocol? Why did it never occur to anyone to just use some generic remote-filesystem protocol, maybe with some kind of extended attributes, to be able to query mail-specific information? BFS anyone?
Apart from that, if you use generic filesystem based technology, any kind of file-based revision control would be more easy to do, Apple Timemachine comes to my mind.
Of course, Privacy issues come to my mind. What if I absolutely and positively needed to erase a file, such that it would not show up accidentally in any kind of snapshot or revision? Not that any kind of military-grade data shredder is required, just not being able to find the file using the ordinary file browser and revision interface would be nice.
Anyways, what I would like to see is some kind of combination between rsync, imap, and a simplified revision control/snapshot system, all based on basic file-system technology.
Well, one can dream every now and then….
Cheers
-Richard