I use a similar setup, but I've been bitten by having Mutt and OfflineIMAP accessing the same Maildir concurrently. So instead, I run a local copy of Dovecot to expose a local IMAP server that both Mutt and OfflineIMAP talk to my Maildir through. This also means that I can trivially set up things like Thunderbird or MacBiff, using the same local IMAP server. Rube Goldberg would be proud.
I do the same, run dovecot, for essentially the same reasons.
It's not Rube Goldberg, it's separation of concerns: dovecot/imap for message serving and storage, and $CLIENT for mail access and processing.
Every so often I get pissed off at my mail client, run up the black flag and start slitting mail client throats[1]. In fact this article started me off on my biannual "doesn't anything not suck" tour, this time looking at claws, alpine and mutt. Anymore though, I just don't give a meh for intricate configuration.
One thing would make me want to spend a day in feverish configuration: if mh ("ah, mh") would do imap. I loved mh back in the day, when there was virtually no interface, just a collection of command line programs. Unfortunately it's pop-only and plain text only, far as I can tell. I have this fantasy of finding the source and ...
