1.8 KiB
mbwatch is a CLI tool designed to monitor mailboxes and automatically invoke mbsync when changes occur in the remote mailbox. mbsync is a highly regarded tool for synchronizing remote email accounts with local maildir, but it requires manual execution to update changes. Typically, this is managed through periodic polling using a tool like cron, which can result in delayed message synchronization.
mbwatch addresses this issue by leveraging the IMAP IDLE feature to continuously monitor the mailbox for changes. When a change is detected, mbwatch automatically triggers mbsync to sync the new messages, ensuring your local maildir is always up-to-date without manual intervention.
Prerequisites
- The remote IMAP server must support IDEL
- The rust toolchain for building
- mbsync installed and configured
Installation
Right now there are no prebuilt binary, you can install from git using cargo.
cargo install --git https://github.com/AdeAttwood/MbWatch
Configuration
This tool will use the mbsync Groups config from your existing .mbsyncrc.
You will need to define a group called mbwatch, it will then watch all the
mailboxes defined in the Channels prop. This should be a comma separated list
of channel:mailbox like you define on the mbsync cli.
This is an example config, it assumes you have two channels called work and
personal each remote store has a mailbox called INBOX and the work
mailbox has one called Archive.
Group mbwatch
Channels work:INBOX, work:Archive, personal:INBOX
For more details on the .mbsyncrc you can view the upstream mbsync docs