syncing mail and address book

[Tim Chase]

>> rsync . 192.168.0.2:. for current directory, replace with ~
>> for home dir
> 
> Thanks, I think that's what I want. Otherwise I'll try some
> bash with diff and patch...

This sounds like a good use for a version-control program (VCS).
  If you want to arbitrarily push mail into and out of various
boxes (I don't remember whether you mentioned if it was maildir
or mbox format), you may be better off using a distributed VCS.
If you can remember to push up before you pull back down, you can
get away with a non-distributed VCS (Subversion has mostly
supplanted CVS).  As Distributed VCS goes, I can recommend both
Mercurial and Bazaar (both of which I've used and quite enjoyed)
and many folks also like Git or Darcs (which I haven't used).

Just initialize a repository and add your mail folder.  You can
then push/pull mail from one folder to another.  As an added
benefit, it keeps all your history so you have some undelete
capabilities, as well as tracking when changes were made.

> And rsync won't remove mail will it? Say if a message exists
> on desktop, but not on laptop will it be removed?

Using a VCS simplifies this greatly because that's what they do
best (keeping folder structures on various machines in a
coordinated state).

Hope this gives you some alternatives to look into.

-tim