Improving Modest email sync reliability

Lots of complains have been reported regarding Modest N900 email client. Particularly when it comes to sync emails. Quoting link title DaveQB:


 * 1) It takes about 20mins to check my email.
 * 2) It uses 100% cpu for the entire time it is checking.
 * 3) Email that is read, deleted etc are not updated on the server-side, so when I check on a different client later, nothing I did on the N900 is reflected.
 * 4) You can't do any searching.
 * 5) It doesn't respect subscribed folder settings on the server

I basically faced all these problems, but synchronization is the top most important one for me. This page is about trying to improve Modest email sync reliability and exploring other ways to read/write emails on N900. It mainly focuses on dealing with IMAP from a GMail account, but may be extended to other IMAP, and even other protocols such as POP.

Accessing a IMAP GMail account using mutt
todo

offlineimap to read emails when no network connection is available
todo

Adding dovecot IMAP server to let Modest accessing emails locally
todo