Email syncing question....

[Aleksandar Milivojevic]

Quoting Andrew Konosky <TerranAce007 at comcast.net>
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 21:46:56

> How do I setup either a shared mailbox on my desktop that forwards 
> e-mail to my laptop, or maybe an rsync cron job to match the mail 
> folders on both systems. Right now I am using Mozilla Thunderbird, but I 
> have evolution and kmail installed also.

Let me save you some pain.  Forget about syncing mailboxes on two different
machines.

The solution you are looking for is IMAP.  With IMAP, all mail is stored and
organized into mailboxes on the mail server (and of course, clients can have
local copies that are automatically kept in sync).  You can access it from as
many computers as you wish, and you will always have same view of the mailbox. 
When you reply to en email on one box, you will see it marked as "replyed" on
all other computers.  When you delete it on one box, it'll get deleted from all
boxes (well, mail is always stored on server, so really it is deleted from
single place, the server).

You have a problem that your mailbox is currently located at ISP.  This means
you have a quota (that as you said fills up very fast), and most ISPs don't
support IMAP (only POP3).  What you will need to do is to install IMAP server on
one of your coputers (for example on your desktop).  With Fedora, you have two
choices.  Dovecot is easier to configure and install.  Cyrus-imapd is much more
complex, but also much more powerfull (however, for one-user installation it'll
probably be an overkill).  The second component that you will need to have is
fetchmail running in daemon mode.  Configure it to periodically connect to your
ISP (say every 5 minutes) and transfer all mail that it finds there to your
desktop.  Configure your email clients to use IMAP on your desktop, and off you
go.  Do not connect to your POP3 mailbox at ISP from email clients anymore (if
they suck email from ISP, than fetchmail will not see them).

-- 
Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic at pbl.ca>    Pollard Banknote Limited
Systems Administrator                           1499 Buffalo Place
Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276                     Winnipeg, MB  R3T 1L7