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?"

Comments

Disconnected IMAP...

[Mendy]

...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.

Well, here are 3 tools to look at...

[emag]

Continue pulling from your pop3 server that you mentioned. When the home box is off, pull using the laptop. Make sure your .procmailrc or whatever's in sync between the two. Then, keep your IMAP server on your home box, and investigate one of these 3 tools to propagate changes on both boxes to each other:

• isync - Synchronize a local maildir with a remote IMAP4 mailbox
• mailsync - Synchronize IMAP mailboxes
• offlineimap - IMAP/Maildir synchronization and reader support

GMail...?

[jdray]

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...