{"slug": "mbsync", "name": "mbsync", "category": "communication", "category_name": "Email and chat", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 6, "warners": 0, "score": 3.591, "rising": 1.67, "first": "2025-12-10", "latest": "2026-10-22", "why": "mirror your various inboxes (Gmail, iCloud, proton, non-corporate outlook) with mbsync", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 3, "compare": 0, "warn": 0}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "mirror your various inboxes (Gmail, iCloud, proton, non-corporate outlook) with mbsync", "kind": "", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://isync.sourceforge.io/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["mbsync"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 801771904, "item_id": 50110744, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50110744", "by": "ebrahimh", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "mirror your various inboxes (Gmail, iCloud, proton, non-corporate outlook) with mbsync", "excerpt": "Good article. I have many of the same services in my setup. Self-hosting email fully is tedious/unnecessary, but what you can do is mirror your various inboxes (Gmail, iCloud, proton, non-corporate outlook) with mbsync and use roundcube or some other frontend to view emails and compose. I use this to easily access mail from different services, and I can also send from any of them. I also have a seperate service that ", "context": "self-hosts a homelab", "use_case": "mirroring email inboxes", "switched_from": "", "story": "What I self-host"}, {"id": 789666592, "item_id": 49354162, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49354162", "by": "ggm", "date": "2026-08-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use mbsync, to Maildir", "excerpt": "I use mbsync, to Maildir and then NMH Maildir to folder/file format. I step over the OAuth with email-oauth2-proxy. There are X frontends to NMH like Sylpheed or claws. They make sense.", "context": "", "use_case": "IMAP sync to Maildir", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Good IMAP Email Clients?"}, {"id": 750031377, "item_id": 46876961, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876961", "by": "1718627440", "date": "2026-02-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "patched mbsync to support the Auth header", "excerpt": "imapsync is slower and doesn't support bidirectional sync. It however handles message identity better than mbsync (http://isync.sourceforge.net/) and supports using different authorization and authentication. For administering our mailserver, I first used imapsync and then patched mbsync to support the Auth header.", "context": "", "use_case": "IMAP mail sync", "switched_from": "imapsync", "story": "Migrate Wizard \u2013 IMAP Based Email Migration Tool"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [{"by": "ebrahimh", "context": "self-hosts a homelab", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50110744", "date": "2026-10-15"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["local email sync", "mirroring email inboxes", "imap sync to maildir", "imap mail sync", "imap sync"], "compared": [{"slug": "imapsync", "name": "imapsync", "co": 1, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "msmtp", "name": "msmtp", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50186037", "title": "Claude Duet", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50109715", "title": "What I self-host", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49353921", "title": "Ask HN: Good IMAP Email Clients?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47490705", "title": "Doom entirely from DNS records", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873885", "title": "Migrate Wizard \u2013 IMAP Based Email Migration Tool", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46140579", "title": "Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-03": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 803114498, "item_id": 50194656, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50194656", "by": "sksksk", "date": "2026-10-22", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "with mbsync running to download all the mail from all my email accounts locally", "excerpt": "I'm always a bit wary about doing write up on things like this, as I kind of just muddle things together and definitely don't follow best practices. I used OpenClaw a while back, I did find it useful, but it wasn't as reliable. This time around, I found hermes a lot easier to use and configure. One thing I think has improved it is building apps to \"pre-compute\" data. For example, with my email, instead of accessing m", "context": "", "use_case": "local email sync", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Duet"}, {"id": 801771904, "item_id": 50110744, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50110744", "by": "ebrahimh", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "mirror your various inboxes (Gmail, iCloud, proton, non-corporate outlook) with mbsync", "excerpt": "Good article. I have many of the same services in my setup. Self-hosting email fully is tedious/unnecessary, but what you can do is mirror your various inboxes (Gmail, iCloud, proton, non-corporate outlook) with mbsync and use roundcube or some other frontend to view emails and compose. I use this to easily access mail from different services, and I can also send from any of them. I also have a seperate service that ", "context": "self-hosts a homelab", "use_case": "mirroring email inboxes", "switched_from": "", "story": "What I self-host"}, {"id": 789666592, "item_id": 49354162, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49354162", "by": "ggm", "date": "2026-08-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use mbsync, to Maildir", "excerpt": "I use mbsync, to Maildir and then NMH Maildir to folder/file format. I step over the OAuth with email-oauth2-proxy. There are X frontends to NMH like Sylpheed or claws. They make sense.", "context": "", "use_case": "IMAP sync to Maildir", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Good IMAP Email Clients?"}, {"id": 760643554, "item_id": 47540222, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47540222", "by": "anthk", "date": "2026-03-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "once you used something like mbsync/msmtp to store your IMAP mail locally", "excerpt": "With iodine you can tunnel TCP/IP over DNS. Really slow but usable for text web sites, gopher, gemini, irc... gopher -> gopher://magical.fish, gopher://sdf.org... gemini -> gemini://gemi.dev, it has geminipedia, a web to gemini converter reading sites over gemini at great speeds. irc -> servers from https://bitlbee.org will allow upon connecting to a registered IRC account to several protocols in the server. For inst", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Doom entirely from DNS records"}, {"id": 750031377, "item_id": 46876961, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876961", "by": "1718627440", "date": "2026-02-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "patched mbsync to support the Auth header", "excerpt": "imapsync is slower and doesn't support bidirectional sync. It however handles message identity better than mbsync (http://isync.sourceforge.net/) and supports using different authorization and authentication. For administering our mailserver, I first used imapsync and then patched mbsync to support the Auth header.", "context": "", "use_case": "IMAP mail sync", "switched_from": "imapsync", "story": "Migrate Wizard \u2013 IMAP Based Email Migration Tool"}, {"id": 739526434, "item_id": 46220402, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220402", "by": "gloghmalogh", "date": "2025-12-10", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I connect to with mbsyc and msmtp.", "excerpt": "Oh goodness, truthfully I'm not sure how well I understand it. I initially set it up a few years ago, and recently futzed with it after my organization changed something about their auth. My configs aren't really in a shareable state so I hope this ramble is at least somewhat helpful. Basically DavMail connects to outlook at creates a local smtp and imap server which I connect to with mbsyc and msmtp. Mu indexes thes", "context": "", "use_case": "IMAP sync", "switched_from": "", "story": "Putting email in its place with Emacs and Mu4e"}]}