On Drew DeVault's blog on May 17, 2021, aerc, mbsync, and postfix for maximum comfortable offline email

I am the original author of the aerc mail client, though my official relationship with it today is marginal at best. I think that, with hindsight, I’ve come to understand that the “always online” approach of aerc’s IMAP implementation is less than ideal. The next email client (which will exist at some point!) will improve on this design, but, since it’s still my favorite email client despite these flaws, they will have to be worked around.

To this end, I have updated my personal aerc setup to take advantage of its Maildir support instead of having it use IMAP directly, then delegate IMAP to isync, a fork of mbsync, and SMTP to a local postfix instance. This brings a much-needed level of robustness to the setup, as my Maildirs are available offline or on a flaky connection, and postfix will handle queueing and redelivery of outgoing emails in similar conditions.1 This allows me to read and reply to email entirely offline, and have things sync up automatically when a connection becomes available.

The password can be configured to run an external command if you prefer to integrate this with your keyring or password manager. I updated my aerc accounts.conf as well, which was straightforward:

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