Re: Offline mail and group cooperation

[Alex Schroeder <alex@emacswiki.org>]

grossjoh@lothlorien.cs.uni-dortmund.de (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> I'm interested in the general approach to doing things at this time,
> I think I can work out the nitty-gritty details later on.  All
> comments appreciated.

At work, most use Outlook and IMAP, and confusion abounds: they don't
split mails into groups, if they do, everybody has his own system.  I
am the only one using Gnus and POP3, and I have a local copy of all
the mails on my computer.  This works perfectly well.  I can use Gnus,
and if all fails, I can grep.  It turns out that I have around 700MB
of mails on my HD, but who cares.  When other people are looking for
that missing email, they still have to ask me, because I am sure to
have it.

So my advice is: Everybody having his own setup works, so why fix it?

> We are a bunch of folks all using Gnus.  Soon we will all have
> laptops and work on them at home, at work, and in the train.  So now
> is the time to think about disconnected usage.  We also cooperate,
> ie we have common groups we post to.
> ...
> And then, still, we could go the low-tech approach: instead of
> common groups or shared folders, we just have mail aliases and
> everybody has their own copy of the message.

Your description did not contain any problem to solve.  What is the
problem you have with disconnected usage?  All I can think of is "If I
move a mail from folder X to folder Y, everybody else should move that
mail from folder X to folder Y."  Is this an accurate description of
the problem?  Perhaps another problem is that "I want all coworkers to
have the mails in the same folders as I do." -- but really, why do you
want that?  So basically, before you start looking for a solution, you
need to specify the problem.  ;)

Alex.