Synchronizing emails data.

[barlad]

Hey all,

here is the deal: I have a laptop and a PC. At any given time I want to be able to synchronize the mail data of my PC and my laptop. That is to say, I want to be able to have the same emails on both computers.
If I receive, send and delete some emails on my laptop while I am traveling, I would like to be able to come back home and make sure I get those same emails on my PC just by typing a command. The updates would take place when my laptop and my PC are on the same LAN.


I am using Maildir format on both computers (well I think that's maildir.. it's default's thunderbird format). I am thinking about using rsync at the moment but I have no clue whether or not that is a good solution. Do you have anything to recommend?

Naturally, I would like it to be as secure as possible.

[needles]

It's a package that uses a technique similar to rsync, but it works both ways. (Changes on laptop are sent to desktop and vice versa.) Rsync works well when you have one place that has a definitive version of all the files involved, and you want to keep other places up to date with that repository. It isn't really designed to deal with both sides making changes to the files, whereas unison handles this quite nicely.

[jimcooncat.]

I'm thinking IMAP (over ssh if you like). Might save you a step, like remembering to rsync before unplugging the laptop from the net.

Not using these technologies yet, so I guess I'm just a n00b.
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[barlad]

Thanks. Looks like unisson is exactly what I want.

[Derringer]

An IMAP implementation on the server end would save you some hassle, assuming you have the ability to do so.

Courier IMAP, if you check it out, stores mail locally so changes are made on the server and any client you might use (including any in addition to the two you mention) would give you a uniform mail interface and mailboxes.

[barlad]

IMAP would not really work for me. In my case I only have clients, I don't have access to the mail servers. I guess I could set up my own private mail server that would collect all the mails from my "public" mail servers but that would be way too complicated and I don't want to add any potentially vulnerable service to my main PC.

Unisson just looks great

[davidblewett]

It was a hassle, but I finally got things set up on my server at home. I use Courier and fetchmail. Fetchmail gets all of the mail from the public servers, then distributes it to the system accounts. I can then connect from the internal LAN to Courier and view the mail. Most email programs have an offline feature, where it will store certain messages/folders on the hard drive of the local machine.

In order to access the server from outside of the LAN, I first SSH into the gateway. I can then use SSH's port forwarding to send all IMAP requests from the local machine to Courier on the gateway. I have the same setup for SMTP and also use Squid for HTTP. Works a treat, now.
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[jimcooncat.]

Congradulations! It is a hassle to set up an email server the first time, but now you have the skills under your belt. I can foresee a future that people who don't take control over their email will be barraged by so much crap that the medium will be unusable to them.
_________________
— JimCooncat
Fly-by-Night Operations Empowerment Advocate