Re: road warrior trying to simplify a mail setup

[David Wuertele <dave-gnus@bfnet.com>]

Randal> Help.  I can't be the only one who wants to read and answer
Randal> email both while online and offline.

I bought myself a 30GB laptop drive and slapped it into an el-cheapo
USB2.0 clamshell enclosure.  My .gnus and all my maildirs are on that
drive.  No matter what computer I plug my USB drive into, when I run
emacs it gets pointed at the .gnus file on the drive.

Each computer that I read news on has a crontab script running once
per minute.  The script checks what interfaces are available and
whether the USB drive is mounted.  If the drive is moutned and one or
more interface is available, the script downloads mail as appropriate
for that interface by selecting the appropriate fetchmail config file
and running

fetchmail --nodetach -f $FETCHMAILHOME/.fetchmailrc-$this

In fact, I have different fetchmailrc files not only for different
interfaces, but for different mail addresses.

Each fetchmailrc has lines like

      mda "/usr/local/bin/maildir ~/mail/maildirs/$some_maildir"

for delivering the mail into the appropriate maildir, where GNUS finds
it.

I find this setup meets my needs perfectly.  I don't need to carry a
laptop around anymore, I just need to make sure that my destination
has a computer with a USB2.0 port and emacs.  In fact, I go a step
further and mount the USB drive as a loop-aes encrypted partition.
But thats a whole 'nother story.

Does this meet your requirements?

Dave