Offline mail and group cooperation

[grossjoh@lothlorien.cs.uni-dortmund.de (Kai Großjohann)]

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.

I guess that nnimap and Gnus Agent is still one of the major
alternatives.  I remember that I tried it a long time ago and I was
confused about which messages it wanted to download automatically.  I
guess that we want to download all messages (regardless of marks) in
selected groups.  Is this possible with the Agent?  The common groups
could be handled via shared folders.  But I think we would want
separated marks.  Does Cyrus allow us to say which marks should be
per-user and which should be per-folder?  Or is there another IMAP
server we should use?  And then there is the thorny problem that
nnimap/agent do not allow moving of messages from one group to
another while offline, right?  (And if we do IMAP, then I think I
want to do my splitting using ifilter.  But that would have to be
done on the server side, and how does ifilter on the server know that
I've moved a message?)

Another alternative might be to install a news server for our group,
and everybody installs leafnode on their laptop.  That would be kind
of cool, really :-) Moving messages could be done with supersede, I
think.  But then we have to maintain a news server installation -- I
think leafnode won't do for the central server, for it allows no local
groups, right?  How difficult is it to install and administer a `real'
news server for this purpose?  Hm.  And then there is the
authentication issue -- we are not paranoid but maybe we want to hide
some groups from our students.  What do we do about personal mail in
this case?  And what about normal news groups like gnu.emacs.gnus?

I wonder if nnmaildir could somehow do the job?  Nnmaildir seems to
be nifty generally, and I'd believe it can make coffee for us :-)
Kudos to Paul.  Alas, I've never really looked at it so I don't have
an idea what it can _actually_ do.

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.

A colleague also said that he ideally wants to be able to access the
mail from any computer, not only from the laptop.  This is for the
case where you are traveling and you find a computer with internet
access and putty, say, but you can't plug in your laptop for whatever
reason.

Are we asking for too many features?

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.

kai
-- 
~/.signature is: umop 3p!sdn    (Frank Nobis)