How to sync a local email storage to IMAP (mutt-friendly)?

## Summary **My problem**: I want to read email offline with my choice of client (mutt), but I want actions like moving emails, etc. to be kept in two-way snc with an imap server. **My question**: Is there a straightforward way to do this while still using standard tools like fetchmail, procmail, etc.? ## Details I have a gmail account. For various reasons - some institutional - I need to be able to read this mail from a mail client; I want my 'inbox' to be clean, much like I would keep it with a traditional local mail setup, and for anything I 'archive' to be searchable. If I move an email to a folder in the web client, I'd like my local inbox to take this into account. When possible, I want to be able to read this mail from mutt. Previously I used mutt's native imap functionality, but mutt has to make a connection to the server each time you run it; the connection often drops while I'm reading mail and mutt is open in the background; it only keeps a cache of message headers, and loading new messages requires a round-trip to the server; if I send a message, I have to wait for it to be acknowledged over STMP before I can look at any other messages. Is there some way around this? I don't consider fat clients like Thunderbird to be a solution: I require terminal access, I like to be able to grep my mail, I make good use of procmail's filtering capabilities, and I prefer decoupled systems. As mentioned above, fetchmail, procmail and sendmail get me *almost* there - but not quite to being able to keep my activity in sync between clients. Am I missing something? I've looked at the FreeBSD handbook's section on email and a bunch of blog posts but nothing seems to bring it all together in this way. By the way, I run Arch Linux and Debian.