On Mon, 21 Oct 2019 at 00:26:58 +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > I syncronize multiple accounts into subdirs below ~/Maildir and track > them as a whole using a single notmuch database.
AFAIK notmuch doesn't speak IMAP so unfortunately that approach breaks layering. I'm unsure how well IMAP servers cope with other processes messing up with the storage backend. At best the server will notice (Dovecot seems to do that unless the *_very_dirty_syncs optimization setting is turned on) and automatically repair indices, invalidate caches, etc. Not sure what's the overhead though (the server might have to stat(2) each message, which on large mailboxes could be rather slow). I don't have any data, but I'd be surprised if all IMAP servers were able to automatically gracefully recover from external writes :-P The standard says nothing about storage backend, so personally I prefer treating it as a black box / implementation detail and give the IMAP server exclusive access (hence point the MUA and other components to the IMAP backend rather than the storage backend). Sadly not everything has an IMAP backend though; most mail software have their own cache, thread, sort, search, etc. logic, while MUAs could in principle rely on the IMAP servers for that :-/ -- Guilhem.
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