Hi Alan,

 have you made any progress on this? I'm also interested in a solution.

I looked into the mbsync state, and it seems that if you have it create the 
state files in the respective directories with
SyncState *
in the definition of the channel and then rsync the files with something like
rsync -qav --include='*/' --include='.mbsyncstate' --include='.uidvalidity' --exclude '.notmuch' --exclude='*' <server>:.mail/ .mail/
it should work... apart from muchsync not synchronizing file names.

I've had a go at that and patched the muchsync source to do that at https://github.com/larskotthoff/muchsync/
I've tested it with the notmuch mailing list archives and it worked fine for the 
~35k mails. With the exception of one mail file, which for reasons that I don't 
understand yet was synced with a different file name. This is for a message ID 
that has 3 corresponding files; the other 2 file names were synced without 
problem.

I haven't tested this "in production" yet. I've reached out to David, but 
haven't heard anything back yet. There are almost certainly ramifications of 
these changes that I haven't considered, but if somebody is feeling adventurous 
and would like to give this a shot, I'd be grateful for any feedback.

Cheers,

Lars


On Mon, 24 Feb 2025 09:45:17 +0100, Alan Schmitt <alan.schmitt@polytechnique.org> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On 2025-02-21 12:49, Lars Kotthoff <lists@larsko.org> writes:
> 
> > Hmmm, as far as I can tell the reason that only one machine should sync is that 
> > the file names for the mail files are not preserved by muchsync. This causes 
> > issues with mbsync as it uses the filename to store the UID.
> 
> I’m afraid mbsync also has some internal state that stores what has been
> synchronized (in ~/.mbsync in my case). Maybe it would work fine when
> preserving the file name (i.e., mbsync would think it needs to fetch a
> file and then see that it is already available), but I have not tried.
> 
> I’m also considering synchronizing my mail files using another mechanism
> (unison), as I already use it for a lot of stuff. Being able to
> separately propagate the state of notmuch would be really useful in that case.
> 
> Reading the page of notmuch-git, it seems that it is exactly what it is
> meant for. But I’m not sure it is actually used this way.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Alan
> 
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