How are you getting your IMAP email for use with mu4e or the like these days?

I'm looking into replacing Thunderbird with mu4e (for the first time, despite being an Emacs guy for 15 years) and I got unexpectedly stuck at step 1, dowloading my email. offlineimap is [broken on newer Pythons](https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap/issues/715), getmail doesn't support Python 3 at all, and fetchmail is infamously inscrutable. It all seems a bit ridiculous, but I guess it speaks to how webmail has come to dominate proper email clients. Any recommendations?

Offlineimap works well under python virtualenv, to run it with python 2 even if your system is running python 3. On a lot of linux distribution it's even still packaged for you to install without worrying about python version. Or maybe you should try mbsync, it's C, thus you should not have any incompatibilities. What system are you running?

I use notmuch, but anyway, in the past was OfflineIMAP, a bit slower than mbsync, perhaps with some bugs, but it support IMAP IDLE (push notification, so can download new mails upon their arrival in the remote inbox, with dunst for nice desktop notification) now the hyper-classic fetchmail + maildrop, since I decide there is no point in leaving mails on the remote server, I keep them on my home server, maildrop offer a far more simple and flexible filtering (autorefiling etc) than afew and muchsync over ssh to my homeserver allow me to have my mails in Emacs on multiple machines with tags and so one. For the now VERY rare mobile usage I still have to complete a local dovecot with a local MailPie served from the homeserver, a day I'll do but I'm still hyper-slow in home-infra development... If you look for IMAP bi-directional support mbsync might be good for you, if you want a more personal approach the old fetchmail is still (little) developed and while need some gimmick for multiple accounts and so on it does work well :-)

If you use a Debian-based distro, you can `sudo apt -y install offlineimap` and it'll work fine. mbsync is another option. I've used both, but am on mbsync these days.

mbsync works very well for me

iSync (mbsync)

I just use gnus, which can fetch imap without need for an external tool.

I'm on Ubuntu 22.04. I'm loath to use offllineimap as a Debian package to keep my Python setup simple. From this and other comments, mbsync sounds promising.

+1

I'm using mbsync as well. If you're specifically coming from Thunderbird and you think you might want to maintain that as a backup client, I believe there's support (which may still be experimental) in Thunderbird for storing email in the Maildir format that mu4e also uses, in which case it *may* be possible to actually use Thunderbird to take care of fetching, and have a single copy of your email with two clients that can use it. Maybe. (I've not tried it, and it wouldn't surprise me if there were pain points -- but if it works, that'd be nice.) * https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/maildir-thunderbird * https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Maildir

fetchmail isn't really too hard to set up, imho. Like, takes only a few minutes, and you can ignore 90% of its options. I just found I couldnt' use Emadcs for email, because none of them support halfway decent html-email presentatoin (ie: images and colours etc.) \*Sadface\*

>getmail doesn't support Python 3 at all i'm using getmail on Gentoo: * dependency graph for net-mail/getmail-6.14 `-- net-mail/getmail-6.14 amd64 `-- dev-lang/python-3.8.13 (>=dev-lang/python-3.8.12_p1-r1) amd64 [ssl] `-- dev-lang/python-3.9.12 (>=dev-lang/python-3.9.9-r1) amd64 [ssl] `-- dev-python/setuptools-62.1.0-r1 (>=dev-python/setuptools-42.0.2) amd64 [python_targets_python3_8(-)? python_targets_python3_9(-)?] [ net-mail/getmail-6.14 stats: packages (4), max depth (1) ]

I started with offlineIMAP but found mbsync to work a lot faster. you might find a few posts saying the same. No issues with mu4e and mbsync setup on my mac(s) and linux machines over 5+ years. There are plenty of example configs if you search online. If you are into gmail style tags (I.e not folders) - you might need to look at notmuch instead of mu4e.

[I have no explanation.](https://pyropus.ca./software/getmail/documentation.html#python3)

I haven’t tried it, but there is also offlineimap3. The repo is right next to offlineimap.