Use IMAP and fetchmail to download messages not seen locally

Question

I have my email stored on a server and I read it from a couple of devices (usually either my smartphone or laptop). I often view messages on my phone but want to respond on my laptop if a longer response is called for.

I'd like to have have fetchmail on my laptop download IMAP messages not based on the "Seen" flag but based on whether or not the laptop has seen them. This seems to work using POP3 with the UIDL flag. Is there anything equivalent I can do with IMAP?

Answer 1

After some research, it looks like the answer is "no". What I'm wanting is basically to connect to IMAP in "disconnected mode" which fetchmail does not support (see the fetchmail FAQ). I will probably migrate over to offlineimap for this.