Mail gateway between linux and windows vista

[E001754]

Hi,

I recently setup a secondary hard drive on which I installed Vista.
While this Vista is intended for gaming, I'd like to be able to seemlessly read my mail whenever I'm am in windows or in linux.
I plan to part the windows disk in two parts. Actually, Vista in installed on the first partition and I didn't format the second one as I wanted time to think about the best filesystem for using that secondary partition as an exchange space between windows and linux.

So, my goal is : first of all, have a disk space that accessible from both windows and linux. For that, I think that ntfs is the best way as now, with ntfs3g, linux can access rw those drives. I don't want linux to access directly the windows C drive as a bug in ntfs3g could damage the system. Probably useless caution, but two partitions doesn't hurt.
Secondly, while having a shared disk space, why not putting there some parameters and use then the same apps between linux and windows, so, whatever system I boot, I feel always at home !
I'd like to use both firefox and thunderbird (I'm on kmail for now) and setting all the parameters of those applications on the shared drive.

So here's my question : is thunderbird able to use the same parameters files and the same mail files so I can check my mails from Vista and from Linux seemlessly ?

[Raniz]

My first thought is: IMAP.

If that isn't possible I'm pretty sure that you can tell Thunderbird where to store it's mail, or create a symlink to your where Thunderbird stores it's mail under Windows.

About the IMAP thing:
I had a similar problem earlier where I wanted to access all my emails from different locations so I set up fetchmail and courier-imap on my server, it worked fine and I learned a lot in the process of setting it up.

Now I've switched to using Gmail though. You can setup your Gmail account to fetch mail from a POP account on another host so you can access them on your gmail account. This is how I'm using it at the moment. I don't even use my Gmail address, but use Gmail to store and fetch my emails so that I can access them easily from anywhere. You can also activate IMAP for your Gmail account and use Thunderbird as your client if you don't like the web-based interface or want a local copy of your emails.

[E001754]

thx a lot for your hints. I'll try that in the next few days, as soon as I find out how to define a partition and format under Vista ! (I knew how to that with fdisk, but fdisk has disapperead with Vista...)



Cheers.

[Raniz]

I think the logical disc manager is the way to go, no idea where you find it though