Syncing mails

Okay, so I had a simple job to be done. I have two mail accounts: A private mail account and a company mail account, which has two folders containing private mails. I want to synchronize these folders to my private account. Which is the right tool to choose? I thought that one way would be to fire up a graphical mail user agent, like lets say Thunderbird, setup the accounts and simply move the mails between them. But this has some implications, like:

• I don't use such a MUA (instead I use mutt), which makes it unneccessary hard, because I really need to setup the accounts
• Most graphical MUAs I know are bad at working with a great number of mails. At least Thunderbird does not even properly show what he is doing and how long he is supposed to doing it

So I decided that I needed some small tool, that UN*X admins are used to have. After a small apt-cache search, I found two tools:

• imapcopy
• imapsync

I installed both and looked at them. For the impatient, a spoiler: I decided to use imapsync.
I had a quick look at imapcopy and it did not have a proper manpage.
Instead it refers to the built-in help (imapcopy -h) which is not useful either and to examples in /usr/share/doc.
After that I had look at imapsync. It comes with a pretty good manpage and a pretty good built-in usage information. Appearently I rate it very important that either the manpage or the built-in help are good enough to get started with a tool. Certainly I know that tools exist where a manpage is simply not enough, but I guess a tool to sync imap folders is not one of them.

After studying the manpage for about 2 minutes I was ready to construct a command line and give it a --dry try. This parameter lets me see what the tool would do if I would ommit it. That one looked good and so I gave it a shot. It then started to work. It has two flaws.

1. Unfortunately it does not indicate its progress and the normal messages are not a good help either, because they contain numbers that actually do not refer to mails in one of the mailboxes (they are soon literally higher as the number of mails in both mailboxes) and I do understand what it is referring to.
   
2. It sometimes crashed at random locations with random messages. I didn't look deeper into it, because restarting the script helped and therefore I cannot speak of a easy reproducible problem. In 3000 mails it happened about 1-2 times, so not a great deal but still annoying.

Anyway, it did the job, which took some time, because of my bandwith.