Hello people,

i'm working on a concept for my email workflow which actually looks basically like this:

1. fetch mails (periodically) from multiple IMAP accounts (delete afterwards from IMAP) and store in one MailDir
2. index mails for searching (tool: notmuch)
3. provide virtual MailDir to support notmuch search queries (tool: notmuchfs)
4. manage mails with mutt

My idea behind this is to have one bucket full of mails and manage them via tagging. I'm aware that I can't use multiple devices with one IMAP account that way but I also don't have all my mails on remote servers all the time.

So here are my Questions:

1. Is there a tool that can fetch mails from IMAP to MailDir and delete them afterwards from server? (it seems like offlineimap, isync and fetchmail don't).
2. What disadvantages/advantages do you see with this workflow?
3. What changes to my workflow would you recommend?

I'm looking forward seeing you participate in this thread.

You can use a combination of procmail and fetchmail for item 1. I don't know the 2 tools you list so can't comment on those.

You can have multiple "recipes" so ought to be able to get from multiple IMAP accounts.

I wrote a blog on extracting attachments that goes into some of the setup for fetchmail and procmail. You can ignore the attachments stuff in that. Hopefully it will give you ideas.

Your general plan sounds reasonable.

Here's a good tutorial on procmail. It's easy to configure once you get the hang of it.

You don't mention what MTA you wish to use the send mail. I can recommend msmtp. It's easy to configure and quite reliable.

This link will give you help on using multiple outgoing accounts in Mutt.