isync

Since ntfs partitions will not accept ; in a filename, you need to change your InfoDelimiter and your FieldDelimiter to something else, you can achieve this by globaly (outside any store or channel configuration) changing the later, like below:

~/.mbsyncrc

FieldDelimiter -

If you want to automatically synchronize your mailboxes, isync can be started automatically with a systemd/User unit. The following service file can start the mbsync command:

~/.config/systemd/user/mbsync.service

[Unit]
Description=Mailbox synchronization service

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mbsync -Va

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

The following timer configures mbsync to be started 2 minutes after boot, and then every 5 minutes:

Once those two files are created, reload systemd, then enable and start , adding the flag to .

If you want to run notmuch or mu/mu4e after automatically synchronizing your mails, it is preferable to modify the above mbsync.service by adding a post-start hook, like below:

You can also index by changing the line to , or to if you are running emacsclient and would like to index .

This modification assumes that you have already setup notmuch or mu/mu4e for your user. If the ExecStart command does not execute successfully, the ExecStartPost command will not execute, so be aware of this!

IMAP IDLE is a way to get push notifications to download new email, rather than polling the server intermittently. This has the advantage of saving bandwidth and delivering your mail as soon as it's available. Isync does not have native IDLE support, but we can use a program like imapnotify to call mbsync when you receive new email. For this example we will use the package which is reported to work better with frequent network interruptions.

Install and create a configuration file for each mail server you want to poll. Note that the file name format, including the .conf, is necessary if you want to use the provided systemd service: (You can view the full configuration options in the project's README.)

Start/enable the user unit.

Note that IMAP IDLE only triggers when new mail arrives, not when there is undownloaded mail on the server. For example, if you receive 100 emails with your computer powered off, then turn on your computer, imapnotify will still not download new mail until you receive another email. For this reason you may want to run mbsync once when you log in.

First install an XOAUTH2 SASL plugin, like cyrus-sasl-xoauth2-git^AUR.

Install and follow its README to configure the account. It will be responsible for getting the current XOAUTH2 token using the account credentials every time mbsync needs to authenticate.

Finally, add and , substituting <provider> and with the values you used for , to the section in the .

supports Google and Microsoft accounts out-of-the-box (for other cloud mail providers, you will need to provide their registration information). Download mutt_oauth2.py (make it executable and put in your PATH if desired) and follow its README for background and to configure the account.

In short, you will need to modify the and for your preferred encryption system as well as add the and from an app registration with the provider (see Isync#App registrations). Then to initialize your tokens, you run and answer the questions in:

$ mutt_oauth2.py userid@myschool.edu.tokens --verbose --authorize

To subsequently receive your access token (the script automatically handles renewing of tokens), you can run:

$ mutt_oauth2.py userid@myschool.edu.tokens

Finally, add and , with the correct paths if necessary, to the section in the .

In order to get a and , you will need an app registration with the provider. You should create your own app registration if possible, otherwise you can use existing app registrations, such as Thunderbird's (under ), which are publicly available until dynamic client registration is supported.

If you get the following error:

Since google enforce SNI when you use TLS 1.3, ensure to run at least isync v1.3.0 See https://sourceforge.net/p/isync/isync/merge-requests/2/ for more details

If you get certificate related errors like

SSL error connecting pop.mail.com (193.222.111.111:143): error:00000012:lib(0):func(0):reason(18) 

you may need to retrieve the server's certificates manually in order for mbsync to correctly verify it.

$ mkdir ~/.cert
$ openssl s_client -connect some.imap.server:port -showcerts 2>&1 < /dev/null | sed -ne '/-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-/,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p' | sed -ne '1,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p' > ~/.cert/some.imap.server.pem

This will create a certificate file called (e.g. ). Alternatively one can download get_certs.sh and run it:

If you wish to do this manually, you may enter:

and it will display output something like:

Simply copy the first block that begins with and ends with , paste into a file, and save with a .pem extension (this is necessary for the next step). Older instructions state that, with Gmail, both certificate blocks must be saved but on testing this was found to be unnecessary.

Now, copy the root issuer certificate to your local certificate folder. In this example (Gmail), the root issuer is Equifax Secure Certificate Authority. This certificate is included in the package.

Configure mbsync to use that certificate:

~/.mbsyncrc

IMAPAccount gmail
Host imap.gmail.com
# ...
CertificateFile ~/.cert/imap.gmail.com.pem

When connecting to an MS Exchange 2003 server, there could be problems when using pipelining (i.e. executing multiple imap commands concurrently). Such an issue could look as follows: So command 9 is to select a new folder, command 10 checks the mail and commands 11, 12 and 13 run in parallel, writing/getting/flagging a mail. In this case, the Exchange server would terminate the connection after the BAD return value and go on to the next channel. (And if all went well in this channel, mbsync would return with 0.) After setting

PipelineDepth 1

in the IMAPStore config part of the Exchange, this problem did not occur any more.

This fix works when syncing with fastmail, but it likely applies to other services as well.

If you move an email to a new folder using an email client, and mbsync causes the email to appear with the wrong date on the server, add this to your configuration file:

 CopyArrivalDate yes

For example, without this setting, moving an old email from Inbox to Archive using mu4e and then syncing to fastmail with mbsync will cause the email to appear in Archive but with the date of the sync.

mbsync uses mtime of email message when uploading from maildir to imap server. You can use fix_maildir_mail_mtime.py script to set mtime from email header.