Re: Offline mail and group cooperation

[Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann)]

(Chris Beggy ) news@kippona.com writes:

> grossjoh@lothlorien.cs.uni-dortmund.de (Kai Großjohann) writes:
>
>> * First of all, there is the disconnected thing.  People access mail
>>   from their laptop while at home, while at work, and they might want
>>   to read it while in the train.  So I want to slurp mails from home,
>>   work on them in the train on the way to work, then send my
>>   responses from the office.
>
> I know you will do everything in gnus, but I'll throw a few
> non-gnuscentric ideas out anyway!

:-)  That's always a good idea.  Look over the edge of your plate, as
a German idiom says.

> If IMAP or nntp requires connecting too frequently, consider uucp to
> handle the disconnected thing.  You can configure it to use ssh
> as well:
>
>   http://perso.linuxfr.org/penso/article/uucp+ssh.html#toc6
>   http://www.internatif.org/bortzmeyer/uucp-over-ssh/
>
> uucp is attractive for composing email while disconnected.  

Hm.  As I understand, UUCP is just a mechanism to transport mail and
news to/from my machine.  So, functionality-wise, there is no
difference between invoking UUCP to fetch news and mail, and invoking
fetchnews (from leafnode) and fetchmail (from ESR) to fetch news and
mail.

But this does not do the shared email thing.

> mew also has a nice queue feature, which holds mail until a
> connection to an MTA can be made, and maybe gnus could
> incorporate that.

Gnus already has that: when you tell the Agent to go unplugged, then
outgoing mails and news are stored in nndraft:queue when you hit C-c
C-c.  You can then send the queued drafts with a command (`J S' from
the group buffer).

>> * Secondly, there is the shared email thing.  People work together on
>>   a project and all email regarding the project should be seen by all
>>   people.
>
> You are already thinking that nntp or IMAP is best for sharing
> efficiently, otherwise, mailing lists and aliases.

The question is, am I missing something?

For example, if there was a bidirectional file synchronization tool
for maildirs, then nnmaildir might be a good choice.

>> * Some of these mails are todo items.  It would be nice to have a way
>>   to see which items are done and which still need to be done.
>
> Good luck!  I think your group is pioneering these sharing
> and coordination techniques.  Thanks for sharing your progress
> and problems.

I have a hard time believing we are the first to do that.  There must
be thousands of people who have already solved this problem.

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