From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/49850 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: James Leifer Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: road warrior trying to simplify a mail setup Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2003 10:30:05 +0100 Sender: owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu Message-ID: References: <86fzr2ek0j.fsf@red.stonehenge.com> <87u1fi2ycx.fsf@unix.home> <86smv2bdpb.fsf@red.stonehenge.com> Reply-To: James Leifer NNTP-Posting-Host: main.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1044523792 16816 80.91.224.249 (6 Feb 2003 09:29:52 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2003 09:29:52 +0000 (UTC) Return-path: Original-Received: from malifon.math.uh.edu ([129.7.128.13]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 18giLO-0004MB-00 for ; Thu, 06 Feb 2003 10:29:19 +0100 Original-Received: from sina.hpc.uh.edu ([129.7.128.10] ident=lists) by malifon.math.uh.edu with esmtp (Exim 3.20 #1) id 18giMU-0005G1-00; Thu, 06 Feb 2003 03:30:26 -0600 Original-Received: by sina.hpc.uh.edu (TLB v0.09a (1.20 tibbs 1996/10/09 22:03:07)); Thu, 06 Feb 2003 03:31:23 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: from sclp3.sclp.com (sclp3.sclp.com [66.230.238.2]) by sina.hpc.uh.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id DAA18832 for ; Thu, 6 Feb 2003 03:31:11 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: (qmail 29794 invoked by alias); 6 Feb 2003 09:30:09 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 29789 invoked from network); 6 Feb 2003 09:30:08 -0000 Original-Received: from concorde.inria.fr (192.93.2.39) by 66.230.238.6 with SMTP; 6 Feb 2003 09:30:08 -0000 Original-Received: from brouilly.inria.fr (brouilly.inria.fr [128.93.8.4]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id h169U6f07650 for ; Thu, 6 Feb 2003 10:30:06 +0100 (MET) Original-Received: by brouilly.inria.fr (Postfix, from userid 11404) id EF7634916; Thu, 6 Feb 2003 10:30:05 +0100 (CET) Original-To: ding@gnus.org In-Reply-To: <86smv2bdpb.fsf@red.stonehenge.com> (merlyn@stonehenge.com's message of "05 Feb 2003 13:49:20 -0800") Original-Lines: 57 User-Agent: Gnus/5.090008 (Oort Gnus v0.08) Emacs/20.7 (i386-mandrake-linux-gnu) Precedence: list X-Majordomo: 1.94.jlt7 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:49850 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:49850 [long reply...] Greetings! I face a similar problem of synchronising my mail on two machines that are often offline. I have been considering using nnmaildir to manage all mail (one message per file). If I understand Paul Jarc's description correctly, this has the advantage of storing each message's mark in a separate file (not together in a big .newsrc). If so, then I could use unison (which already synchronises bidirectionally my 600 MB home directory in seconds) for the mails and marks. Anyone tried this? Unison is at: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ . Another interesting tool I noticed (but haven't had time to play with) is offlineimap: http://gopher.quux.org:70/devel/offlineimap/ As far as I understand it, an ideal scenario looks like this: (1) Imagine two machines, A and B, that can connect to each other from time to time, each of which has a complete replica of my mail. (2) I make changes on machine A involving both the physical messages (moves between groups, creation of new gcc'd messages, deletes, etc.) and the marks (read, replied, etc.), with gnus keeping a log of what has changed. (3) Likewise, I make changes on machine B. (4) I connect A and B and some tool merges the two change logs and then (bidirectionally) copies and deletes files so that the replicas are again identical. The merging might have to deal with conflicts that I need to resolve manually (e.g. on one replica I have deleted a message, on the other I have moved it to another group). What would it involve to implement? (2) requires gnus to keep logs of message and mark changes. Can the agent do this? (It might need to record things like "message with message-id x and hash y and file name z has moved from group c to group d".) (4) requires a tool to parse the log files and ask about conflicts. The actual copying could then be handled by unison. Anyone tried this? Regards, -- James Leifer, INRIA Rocquencourt, France