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Managing Mail Between a Desktop and a Laptop?
dotancohen asks: "I'll soon be getting a new Dell laptop that'll be running Fedora Core 5 or 6. I need to access the email stored on my home box from the laptop, and also to read new email sent to me while I'm not home (and the home box is shut down). If I run an IMAP server at home, then I can't read the mail when the home box is down. However, if I pull from the POP3 server (and leave the mail on the server) then I won't be able to sort and file the mail while on the go. I currently use Kmail, but I might switch to Eudora in April/March when it becomes available for Linux. Is there anyway to sync the mail accounts between two Linux boxen, assuming that I'm using the same mail client?"
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
I was going to tell you how, but then you said "boxen".
I keep two copies of my mail. One goes into a pop account, and gets pulled into my main machine, and the other goes to gmail. But you could send one to an IMAP account, one to a POP account, etc.
.forward file to send it to a pop account provided by my cable modem company, and to my gmail account. I've configured the gmail account to send mail from my vanity domain.
My SMTP mail server is running on a VPS. I send incoming mail to an account on that machine, and use a
It's not a perfect solution -- if I send an email from gmail, it doesn't show up in the sent folder on my main machine. But it's very easy to set up, and I can get at gmail from anywhere.
I think it would be better to use an IMAP server, to roll my own webmail solution that talks to the IMAP server, and to make it possible for the laptop to talk to the IMAP server. But the amount of work that would take deters me. My solution was easy to set up, even if its flawed.
You can even use something AOL's AIM Mail which allows you to access it via IMAP. Forward your mail there, but otherwise don't use the address.
...is probably what you want - and KMail appears to support it.
Alternatively Thunderbird certainly supports cache'ing a copy of messages for working offline but I'm not sure if it supports the kind of resyncing that you're looking for.
It's probably not the coolest or most direct solution, but my whole family is enjoying a vanity domain from Domain Direct, which allows for adding IMAP-capable mailboxes to the hosting account for $0.75/month. They are spam filtered by a pretty good little off-site service, as an added bonus.
I'm not particularly promoting their service over that of another company, but my experience with Domain Direct has been generally positive.
Simply use any mail client you can run entirely off of a USB flash drive. There is no need to sync when you only have one client!
Pine + SSH, now you've got your mail synced anywhere on the planet.
1. The proper.
Use IMAP server that is online. Like at your ISP if you can't provide aviability yourself.
2. Poor mans IMAP.
Use POP with few accounts and aliases. This also requires the server to be aviable.
Make one account name it - main@account.tld - make it forward all incoming email to other two (or N) accounts like: desktop@account.tld, laptop@account.tld... Make your desktop client use the desktop account and laptop use the laptop account. Make your both (or N clients) do BCC to your main@account.tld for any sent meassage.
Voila - done, you have the same messages (incoming and outgoing) on both (or N) POP accounts. You just need to download them to clients.
rsync?
Use an IMAP server.
You even answered it yourself, except decided it is of no use as it would be unavailable when your home connection goes down.
So.. get a cheap hosting/email account with IMAP capabilities, so that it's accessible over the net. Every mail client setup to use the IMAP account will see the same folders/inbox, and it'll work from anywhere. If you're paranoid about having your data in someone else's hands, download it to an archive locally with fetchmail or similar.
Most IMAP clients cache local copies of the messages to speed up display and allow for offline use. I know that the already-seen messages in both Mail.app and Thunderbird are visible even when I can't reach my mail server. I'd would just recommend using IMAP and running your own server, with clients that cache. Also set up SquirrelMail on the server so that you can access your mail from kiosk-type computers and you'll be all set.
I've run a setup like this for years and it works out great.
Gmail?
Maybe I'm not fully understanding what it is you're trying to do....but if you're running an IMAP server at home, why would it ever be turned off? That's your *mail* server. And if there's the possibility of it being turned off, maybe you should look for a hosted solution or something?
How do I manage mail between a laptop and a desktop? I bought my own domain and pay for budget hosting. They provide IMAP mail servers. I used to check everything with Thunderbird using IMAP, and then when I wasn't at my computer with Thunderbird, I could log into the webmail interface and everything would be there.
Now, I actually have everything forwarded to my gmail account. Yes, I went to the dark side, but gmail's web interface and spam control can't be beat. And now I don't have to maintain a local Thunderbird install or anything else. All of my email can be checked and worked with remotely from anywhere. It really isn't that hard!
Just switch to gmail and be done with it.
First I was going to setup a local IMAP server on my desktop, and do it like that. Then I decided to just ssh and execute mutt remotely. No syncing necessary as its all in one place. Just another alternative suggestion. (I also thought about an NFS mounted maildir as an alternative to full blown IMAP, but that seemed kind of silly).
Why not fork?
Amazingly enough, Microsoft Exchange together with Outlook does all of this extremely well. You can set up your own server or use the paid hotmail subscription.
Then again, why you would ever want to use mail directly on your home machine when you can just use the laptop is beyond me!
1. POP on both home and laptop machines. Configure your primary machine (home?) to leave mail on the server for X days. [I believe most clients support this, but I couldn't tell you for sure; I haven't used POP for a couple of years now.] Make sure X is large enough that you will get mail on the laptop or desktop, whichever is used least. Configure your secondary machine to leave mail on the server. This will allow both machines to get mail at the same time, has only one machine deleting mail, and should do what you want. My parents are configured similar to this and it works well for them. So far I haven't noticed any problems in the server logs if both login to the POP server at the same time.
2. I use IMAP for myself. In this case, I host my own on my server, and it does not get turned off. I have IMAP access from any IMAP client as well as a web mail client. My pda phone even uses IMAP to get messages. Any changes I make from my phone, IMAP client at work or home, or web mail all show up on the other clients thanks to the shared IMAP folder. [If you are going to store thousands and thousands of messages, make sure you use a high-performing IMAP server.]
3. Use a mail client that uses a maildir and not an mbox or other db type of storage file. Then, you can use rsync back and forth between your primary and secondary machines. Indexes (for sorting) might need to be updated after each sync however. I would say this would probably be the least efficient and most prone to problems.
4. Send all your mail to gmail, access it from them with POP (see #1), except don't delete anything using the POP clients. Periodically log into your gmail account and either archive or delete everything that is read.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The first answer that came to mind was: do like everyone else, use IMAP. You said running IMAP on your home machine isn't a solution, because you turn it off. So run it on a machine that isn't turned off, like some provider's mail server. If your current provider doesn't offer IMAP, you can always have your mail forwarded to another account. I can offer you an account through my company, if you wish.
The second answer that comes to mind is: store your messages in directories, with one file per message (e.g. MH, Maildir, or mailfiles format), then use some sync program (e.g. rsync, or some specialized tool, like isync) to sync between the two machines. I've done this for some time; it works as long as you're careful that filenames assigned to messages are unique (they aren't always for MH) and one message has only one filename (Maildir renames files when certain flags are set on the message).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Buy two mac and use .mac. Works fine!
Salut a toi EX Punk anarchiste devenu nouveau mouton conformiste...
Get a Dell Latitude D Series Laptop. The Port Replicator, and the Dock both work great. Then ditch the Desktop. Then you 'have' the main machine with you always.
(If you are going to be turning the desktop off when away, this is an equivalent and more elegant solution)
Problem Solved.
``Why not fork?''
Because you're a child!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Why not just run the client from work with ssh -X? Shell into your gateway, then shell into your mail machine and run the client you usually do. I use Kontact and it works well, given an adequate network. There is some lag, but it's not much worse than the lag experienced at home.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I have several domains which I use the catchall and several email accounts that I receive mail from daily. I got tired of backing up my email, transfering my email, making sure I could read new mail between systems, dual boots etc... so I decided just to use one webmail account for all of my email. I send it all through gmail to weed out the spam and pick it up in my yahoo plus account. This way I have at least two backups on different mail servers and the convenience of always having my new mail available.
Sorting and organising your email is not the job of the mail server; use a program like Opera's M2 to apply the rules you need at the pickup(s) and just use POP. IMAP seemed like a good idea at the time but is hopelessly outdated now compared to the abilities of a good email client.
It's called "disconnected IMAP" and is like cached IMAP: KMail pulls the stuff on your box so you can view it even when you have no network connection, like with POP3. But since this is IMAP and everything is on the server, you can do that with several clients. I've got my own IMAP server and use KMail's disconnected IMAP at home and at work. It works just fine...
Why no just do email on the lappy, and other things on the box? I've been using a laptop as my primary computer (i.e. email/IM/irc/etc) for abt 8 years now, even though I also use other computers for other things. I don't understand why some people want to do the same thing from 2 computers sitting right next to each other. Any ideas on how to make my microwave burn toast the same way my toaster does? :-)
I use GMail. About any web-based mail should suffice. I suspect that some of the other web mail services have advanced capabilities for sorting and such. Google offers GMail for domains so you can use your own domain name, and you can access it through a POP3 interface. Just a thought...
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Spam is also the main problem I have with switching to gmail. My old filters (mostly a highly trained bogofilter) let perhaps one spam through on a bad day. GMails tend to let 10 spams through.
I was going to suggest POP3 with leave-mail-on-server + sorting rules: this way works well for me. Also, force thunderbird to BCC your own email on every message you send out - that way the threads of conversation look beautiful AND you get a trail of "sent" emails on all machines you use.
However, if you really want to always have a perfect sync, consider putting the mail folders on a flash drive and using that every time you check your email. That adds some security too, since if the data is not present, it can't really be compromised (of course you should also encrypt the data on flash drive).
I checked while migrating from windows to linux - thunderbird uses the same format for mailboxes (you should be able to use it directly)
HTH
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
I tried a number of things because I am in the same situation. I have a very old (Pentium II era) computer that I always have on, and a cronjob runs getmail periodically, which drops the mail off to maildrop, which sorts the mail and delivers it in maildir format (also, the first rule is to copy the message into a backup folder). Then I just run an IMAP server that reads the maildir directories. The reason that I ended up doing this rather than the various other solutions I might have done is that this gives you a lot of flexibility down the road. For example, you can easily send the mail through dspam or SA to do spam filtering. Also, all the mail filtering is done at one place which is nice if you want to sync up another computer.
.forward file to send it to a Gmail account, and then I can fetch the mail via POP from that account. This worked pretty well, except for two problems:
If you don't have an always-on computer there are various ad-hoc ways to sync mail between two computers (e.g. running rsync). The problem with that is that as the amount of mail you have grows, syncing will take a very long time, much more so than running IMAP. It's best to have the mail all in one place, which pretty much requires an always-on computer.
Another thing that you may want to consider is forwarding mail through Gmail. I have an email account that receives a lot of important mail, but that mail is _only_ locally delivered. I set up my
1) All your mail will be in one folder, and you can't see what has been classified as spam
2) Gmail tries to keep track of what mail you have retrieved via POP for you, and its POP server pretends not to see mail that you have already fetched unless you manually reconfigure it on your account. So if you fetch all your Gmail mail from one computer, and then wait 24 hours and try to fetch all messages from a second computer, the second computer will only have mail from the past 24 hours.
#include ".signature"
Eg. Thunderbird has the ability to work in offline mode and download/upload all messages when it gets online again.
As others have said, just leave the mail on the server for N # of days. As long as you check your e-mail on both systems within the N days, you'll have copies of every message on both systems.
The trick is that you can get Thunderbird to automatically BCC every message you send to yourself. Next setup a message filter to automatically move those messages into your Sent folder. Now both systems contain a copy of every message you send. I've used this method for over seven years, and it works great.
... seriously. Being taken seriously (as a technology type) is sufficiently hard without this type of dorkiness.
How about you jsut go nuts and pay like 5$ a month to get some hosting that provides you with IMAP (with SSL or TLS or whatever security you want/need)?
You can access it from anywhere, anytime. Most of them also offer a webmail, so you can check your emails truly anywhere, anytime.
Jack
IMAP.
I had the same problem then I discovered that GNUS is a pretty nice email client. Now I used a single instance of GNUS running on my mailserver and I ssh to it. Sometimes the latency is kind of painful but so far I really like this setup. BBDB is a pretty good addr book and the emacs spellcheck is good too. You get incremental search for free too. GNUS is ugly but it is much more usable than any installable webmails out there. GMail is good too. I would use it if I wasn't an emacs user. The leaning curve of GNUS for someone not familiar with emacs must be steep: you need to hack elisp to configure it as a mail client and to setup your filters...
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
unison is the best thing since sliced bread. keep your mailboxes in Maildir/ format and just unison between the machines periodically. since unison is symmetric, you can pull your mail down from either your laptop or your desktop and it will propegate to the other one on the next sync.
http://notanumber.net/
Why shut down your home system? Why not have it available as a server to make your life easier? I agree with other posters about using "offline" mode of Thunderbird and like clients.
In case you're thinking that you have a particularly repressive ISP...
My ISP blocks ports 80 and 25 - particularly irritating, if you ask me. My ISPs TOS, if read to the letter, would mean that multiple browser windows or tabbed browsing are inappropriate because it's more than one session over the broadband pipe.
I agree that it would be ideal if I could use every port I want, block the ones I want to firewall - but I'm too cheap to pay for that kind of access.
So I work around it. I use dyndns [dyndns.com] to create a pointer to my dynamic IP address. My ISP does not block https or ssh ports, so I leverage those to get what I want.
I use cron, fetchmail [berlios.de],
procmail [procmail.org],
spamassassin [apache.org], and
postfix [postfix.org] to bring mail from my ISP to my local system.
I use uw-imapd [washington.edu] to share my mail with other computers on my home network
I use ssh and pine, or apache+php+MySQL+https (self-signed cert) with roundcube [roundcube.net] to get remote access to my IMAP server.
I use WinSCP [winscp.net] to get access to my files at home when I'm at work. My data is *MINE* and I easily back it up (nightly and offsite qurterly - snapshot backups coming soon thanks to rsnapshot [rsnapshot.org], perl and rsync)
Every tool that I use is free of charge and as free as the GPL and apache licenses are free (zealots can feel free to argue with someone else about the relative freedom of the GPL, thanks.)
I certainly could pay for more open TOS with an ISP - I could even host my applications at an ISP. I'm cheap, and this solution works well enough for me.
Hope you find a solution that works for you!
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
IMAP. Works great if you have an IMAP server always available.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I have Thunderbird between both computers, and it works as follows:
1) Everything of 'true' importance stays on the webmail (like school meetings, etc.)
2) All the stuff that is of less importance (LiveJournal, Facebook, and *gasp* even Slashdot) gets sorted with the filters and pulled from the webmail to sit on the client. Yes, it means that mail is now on a specific machine, but because it's of less importance, you're not missing anything (and it's probably also saner).
It's either this or gmail, but it suits me well.
You won't be able to do this since you in particular want to be able to turn off your home linux server.
/am/ a /. user). So I mostly prefer people just reach me by my cellphone (don't forget to take advantage of your provider's email-to-SMS gateway... somehow!) :P
But I've wondered for a while about how to set up the ultimate email system and came across the following combination of software running under Debian:
* Exim MTA
* Procmail (for storing mail in Maildir format and sorting mailing lists)
* SpamAssassin
* Courier IMAPd (for allowing IMAP access from multiple email clients)
* fetchmail
* fetchyahoo (pull stuff from my yahoo product/spam account)
This configuration is not trivial to set up, but the Debian package system takes care of a lot of it. There are a few good howtos to cover the rest, such as:
http://hurring.com/howto/debian_mail_server/
I can then access my mailbox from the following clients (sometimes simultaneously, some IMAP clients sometimes don't cope well with that, however):
* mutt + screen + ssh (this is my primary client, however it took quite some time to configure and tame mutt and I'm still not happy with it in some respects)
* Thunderbird / Icedove (GUI client, easier to define some additional message filters I'm too lazy to code up in Procmail)
* Squirrelmail + Apache2 SSL (webmail imap client)
* Palm T5 VersaMail (PDA syncs recent INBOX messages only)
I've found that my primary hurdle is now syncing address books / contacts between all of my clients. Has anyone found an easy way to sync from PDA to/from Mozilla mail and mutt aliases? If I actually used my mail much I'd try to put more effort into getting multisync + some additional scripts going.
I find that most of my friends and contacts are on other various instant message networks now, so all this is also supplemented by:
* bitchx + screen + ssh (the majority of my friends are old-school IRC dwellers)
* centericq + screen + ssh (great for keeping up on livejournals as well as most of the other IM networks)
* gaim (GUI multi-IM network thing)
* skype (the linux client hasn't seen an update in a while, but appears to work fine)
Remember to add a contact form for your webpage listing your handle on all of your various accounts so people can reach you. I wish there was some sort of centralized address-book service that we could sync our contacts from.
This is all quite a bit of work and resources to dedicate towards keeping in contact with a mere handful of friends and relatives (after all, I
That doesn't seem very well thought out to me.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Honest answers:
English is an amalgam of other languages, so grammar doesn't necessarily follow hard-fast rules, as I am sure you are aware. I suspect the reason the words don't pluralize the same way (even though they end with the same sound) is probably due to the respective root words coming from different parent languages.
This link gives a quick lowdown on English plurals. It seems that the -en plural for ox originates in Old English. Child -> children is another example. Then you have something like the word cactus -> cacti, and compare that to virus -> viruses.
That probably doesn't help you out too much, hmmm? My Spanish teacher always claimed that English is one of the most difficult languages for a non-native speaker to learn correctly, the reason being that English grammar doesn't follow its own rules as consistently as most other languages.
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
the boring solution is to get yourself a cheap-as-chips web hosting account with something like cPanel so you can easily manage your mail accounts. Throw all your mail at that server, and access it with IMAP from home or on the go. Use fetchmail to collect your ISP's POP mail and deliver it to your IMAP account if required. Try and find one with SSH access, then you can easily setup some backup process to grab a copy of your mbox's periodically just-in-case.
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Get a virtual host that you can run 24x7 and put your IMAP server on that. Add in AUTH and TLS and you can send from it as well. And it won't care if you are on a desktop, notebook, or crackberry.
I very much prefer having all my mail on an IMAP server (accessed over SSL only). As you mention, this is problematic when you don't want to run your desktop machine at home 24/7.
Until recently, I had a Linux server for this specific purpose. However, after years of relatively trouble-free service, the hardware was getting old to the point where keeping it running was becoming more troublesome than buying something else.
So I bought a Mac Mini for several reasons:
1. It is very silent
2. It uses only 20-25W (!), even much less (3-5W) when in sleep mode - though you'll have to disable that when you use it as a server, obviously. This is quite important to me for devices that are running 24/7. I'm not just pulling these numbers out of my ass, check for yourself, e.g. here or here
3. It runs UNIX. Installing Courier IMAP and some other basic services (apache, already installed by default; PHP, installed a more recent version) took me just a few hours.
4. The builtin harddisk is not very big and quite slow. Also it's hard (though not impossible) to replace when it breaks. So I bought a 250 GB external drive to go with it. If you buy the right one (e.g. the MiniMax), it even looks nice together with the Mac Mini.
5. It's small, just put it on your desk somewhere.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I mean, really, if you can't even compose a question in a succinct enough manner to be understood, perhaps you should not only *not* be running your own email server, you shouldn't even be running Linux, or for that matter, a Dell.
Why make things complicated?
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Plain IMAP isn't enough these days.
:-)
Most IMAP servers don't offer good enough mail and spam filtering.
I use a IMAP email server and soon found that what with my email client having spam filters, mail rules for redirecting mail to folders, multiple identities for all my mailing lists, etc. that as soon as I updated my home PC, I then needed to update my laptop machine and vice versa.
The solution?
I use Thunderbird and I sync all the files it uses between my two machines using 'Unison'. About 1MB worth.
It works too.
I did try placing the portable TB on a USB stick but it's so damn slow.
Now what would be nice would be if Thunderbird could do this sync'ing itself.
I see no reason why it couldn't dump its own important files into a IMAP folder and then on opening it could compare the files in this folder and then on the machine. That way it's always up to date.
A futile hope I know...
Stuart http://stuarthalliday.com/
I have stumbled upon the same problem here, without wanting to pay for a hosted server, nor even wanting to set my own IMAP server at home, as it would be a waste of energy.
Then I also thought about what would be the best solution, and behold: if you have a laptop, that should always be with you, at home or not, so why not use only the laptop for mail? The storage size is unbeatable, and I would use a webmail if I really needed to access my mail from other computers, as I would only need to read new mail, rarely old ones.