KMail - can I collect mail from machine on LAN?

[Timothy Murphy]

Brian Richardson wrote:

>> My question is: I am running KMail on my laptop.
>> Currently I look for mail in /var/spool/mail .
>> Is there any way I could look for mail on my desktop,
>> ie on a remote machine,
>> without running an IMAP server or something like that
>> on the desktop?
> 
> Short answer, yes. See below for more.
> 
> [ snip ]
> 
>> Is there some general programming technique (like named pipes)
>> which would allow a remote address to appear to be local?
> 
> There is a generally accepted protocol called NFS which allows remote
> filesystems to appear as part of the local filesystem. I have used NFS
> to mount /var/spool/mail to whatever machine I wanted to read mail on.
> I think there is a configuration setting in KMail to allow it to use
> mutt-style dotlocking which you will need to read mail from an NFS
> mount. See exports(5) on the system which has your live mail spool. You
> may also want to google for some general advice on setting up NFS on
> your network.

Thanks for that.
I hadn't really thought of using NFS,
but I'll look into it.
I guess I am slightly reluctant to use NFS over WiFi,
as I am not sure what will happen if the link breaks
(as it does occasionally).

Also I suppose I would have to ensure that NFS did not try to run
if I was away from my desktop.
My recollection is that NFS hangs for a very long time
if it does not succeed?



-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland