gmail syncing

[Alex Botero-Lowry]

Hi All,

About two of three months ago, I stopped using notmuch because for some
reason notmuch refused to import the maildir produced by offlineimap with
the weird no thread id error. I passed along some of the messages notmuch
was failing on to cworth but they imported fine for him. At that point I
switched to just using work webmail and gmail. I also got an android phone
and so the syncing issue became a serious issue.

I miss notmuch, a lot. It's pretty clearly the mailer UI and to a lesser
extent backend I've always wanted, and so I'm just about ready to try and
switch back again. It's just, the syncing problem is a huge one. Not only do
I now have a phone in the mix, but I'm no longer using my personal computer
for work (I have a work desktop and laptop that need to be in sync too!)
There is an upside though, since $NEWJOB is at Google, I'm now using gmail
for all my email. :)

With all that in mind, I've started to think seriously about the syncing
problem. Thanks to gmail labels being close to, if not equal to notmuch
tags, I believe it's possible to have a full sync between a remote gmail
account and (many) notmuch dbs.

The basic plan is to use gmail's terrible IMAP support (I've already
complained about it :), since it's powerful enough information to do label
syncing. [GMail]/All Mail folder will be streamed out to probably an Mh
directory. Every n messages notmuch new gets called and then a remove of
inbox tag is done for every message added (would be nice to be able to get
notified of which messages were visited, but shouldn't be necessary). Soon
after the gmail syncer daemon will do a folder/label scan and call a bunch
of notmuch add's for all the newly added label, message-id pairs (yeah, this
part is pretty hand wavy). That should  get the gmail -> notmuch state
complete with gmail labels working properly.

The reverse counts on notmuch getting support for hooks for tag add and
remove events, that can enqueue a a tag, message-id pair with the gmail
syncer daemon that can then copy or remove the messages from the appropriate
Label/Folders in IMAP.

I suspect getting this to run efficiently will be hard, but I think the
basic principle should allow close to full bidirectional syncing with gmail
labels.

alex
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