nnimap vs nnmaildir & nnir

[Gour]

Hello,

last few months I spent with mu(4e) which was working nicely when mail
is concerned.

Otoh, I prefer using Gmane for mailing lists which offer superior
interface and (un)subscribing is much easier than going via mailing
lists’ software, so I’ve decided to go (back) to Gnus…

However I like mu’s capabilities when it comes to search and considering
to use notmuch (there is no nnir-mu-engine) along with Gnus, but I
looking for advice how to configure it.

There are, afaict, two options:

a) continue using mbsync to sync my remote IMAP accounts with localhost
Maildir tree and then use nnir-notmuch for searching all my email (of
course, gmane engine is used for Gmane newsgroups) and nnmaildir as
back-end for the complete mail.

b) use nnimap back-end for accessing remote IMAP email as well as imap
backend in nnir for searching ’IMAP’ mail and use nnir-notmuch for
quering my ’archive’.[1]

Ocassionaly I have a need to receive/send mail using my Android smart
phone[2], so I can not simply using e.g. getmail to fetch my email to my
localhost and simply using nnmaildir therbey avoiding need for syncing.

Moreover, I remember that in the past nnmaildir was quite slow and
people were complained about its non-standard using of flags, so I’m
worried whether it would interfere badly with mbsync?

For that reason, the solution b) seems optimal by eliminating need to
sync email by using plain IMAP, while leaving the querying to powerful
notmuch which can cope with Maildir and in that way nnmaildir would be
’freed’ to cope with flagging since the archive is more static -
messages are just added to it without changing their status.

Any hint?


Sincerely,
Gour

Footnotes: 
[1]  My usual workflow is to act asap on my IMAP email and after it’s
processed then I simply archive the messages which should be kept in my
’archive’ folder for the current year which will be eventually moved
into archive_2015 folder.

[2]  My wife is mostly using phone for her email.

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