syncing mail and address book

[Alan Peery]

Daniel Dalton wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have just set up my laptop with ubuntu linux.
> My home desktop is  running debian linux.
>
> So how can I sync all my emails from the laptop to the desktop?
I do this by

   1. Keeping a linux box running at home that runs an IMAP demon
      (dovecot) and opening port 993 thru my NAT firewall for secure access
   2. Running fetchmail on the home box to fetch email from my ISP to my
      home machine
   3. Despam on the home machine. I put it into a folder to search for
      false positives, just in case.
   4. Filtering the email on my home machine into folders.  I am current
      doing this with an email client (thunderbird) running in a VNC
      session, but plan to switch to procmail. 
   5. Connect my wandering laptop(s), mobile phones, web mail, etc. to
      the IMAPS service above.

This is very flexible, and allows me to pull down only the non-filtered 
email into my mobile device for times when I'm getting charged for 
bandwidth.
> And how could I sync the address books in alpine?
If you're running alpine on both the home box (as a client to IMAP 
running on the localhost) and on your laptop, the recommendations for 
rsync that others have given is a good one.

Alan