Maildir operation (etc)

[Geoff Everist <geoff everist net>]

First up, grats to the Balsa team on a very nice looking MUA. It seems to
have just the right footprint/functionality balance. It is easily the best
X based mailer I have tried so far (and I have tried a few).

I have been on the bleeding edge updating the cvs version pretty much every
night, and it seems that the IMAP implementation still has a little way to
go. As a result, I have come up with a hack that might interest some others
on the list.

As I use Qmail and Courier IMAP on my email server (remote), I have a
Maildir structure. I normally retrieve my email at home (local) over a
fairly slow dialup link, which makes IMAP a little difficult when dealing
with large attachments. In order to overcome this and other problems with
the IMAP implementation, I have been using unison
(http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) over ssh to replicate my local
and remote Maildir directories. Balsa, of course is configured to use my
local Maildir, which means it is lightning fast. I have a cron job set up
to run unison every hour.

This has worked very well so far, however it has brought up some issues
with the Maildir implementation. When I set this up, I deleted
~/.gnome/balsa, and went through the druid setup. Instead of using the
default directories for the inbox, etc, I specified the Maildir
directories. Balsa seems to have handled this OK according to the
~/.gnome/balsa file, however the cur, tmp amd new directories appear as
folders in the Mailbox list. There is also a mailbox called sqwebmail-sig
which has no corresponding entry in the ~/.gnome/balsa file, and
corresponds to an file that resides in ~/Maildir (obviously required by
sqwebmail). Is there any way to get rid of these folders and mailbox from
the Mailbox list (using delete does not work)?

Apologies for rambling on, I hope the Maildir replication idea is actually
useful to someone.

Cheers
Geoff Everist