[ILUG] Sync-ing kmail on desktop and laptop

[Proinnsias Breathnach]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 01:58:50PM +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Thanks for your response, but I am still somewhat confused.
> 
> 1. If I ran IMAP properly, would the upshot be the same
> as if I connected to my desktop from my laptop with ssh,
> ran kmail on my desktop and viewed it on my laptop
> (which is what I am doing now)?

Yes, but even simpler :)

> 2. What actually happens with my setup
> when I run kmail on my laptop
> is that new email in /var/spool/mail on my desktop
> finishes up in a new kmail folder IMAP/inbox
> (I call the account "IMAP") on my laptop.

Kmail on your desktop should have _exactly_ the same configuration as
Kmail on the laptop - that is to say, both should _only_ access your
mail by IMAP, forget about directly accessing /var/spool/mail

> Your picture shows dovecot on the desktop
> communicating with kmail on the desktop.
> But how does dovecot know anything about kmail?
It doesn't need to - dovecot talks IMAP, in the same way as apache talks
http, neither need to know what the client is.

> 3. I assume - I haven't tried this -
> I could export /var/spool/mail from my desktop to my laptop,
> and then I assume running kmail on the laptop
> would be exactly the same as running it on the desktop.
> My question is: can I get the same result with IMAP?

You'll get a cleaner result with IMAP - NFS will bring pain and
suffering in situations like mail - especially if both clients are
trying to update the same file(s)

> 4. Alternatively, if I could tell kmail on my laptop
> to look for new mail in 192.168.2.1:/var/spool/mail
> rather than in /var/spool/mail
> that should give the same result.

Seriously - forget the NFS route, it'll only bring pain and suffering !

> 5. As a matter of interest, how exactly does IMAP
> differ from POP in this context?

When you fetch a mail by POP, it is transferred to your local machine
permenantly - fetching from another machine won't see the message that
machine 1 got.

With IMAP, everything stays on the server, and are copied to the client
only as/when needed. You can have 10 versions of kmail looking at the
same IMAP folder and each will see _all_ the messages.

P