Re: road warrior trying to simplify a mail setup

[Michel Schinz <Michel.Schinz@epfl.ch>]

merlyn@stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz) writes:

[...]

> I understand there's an offline reader mode, but I'm not sure how
> that would work for my setup. Would I need to set up an IMAP server,
> and could that let me access unanswered email both on and off the
> box?

I have a pretty similar setup as yours (Mac laptop, not always
connected, Linux box at work, always connected, and occasional need to
read my mail from an Internet cafe).

I have been using IMAP to handle all that for almost two years now and
I've been pretty happy with my setup. Let me describe it quickly.

On my Linux box, which is always online, I use Gnus to read my mail,
in "online" mode. That is, I never tested Gnus in offline mode (with
agent) and cannot say whether it works well or not. It does, however,
play nicely with other IMAP clients which also access the mailboxes.

On my Mac laptop, I use Apple's Mail.app, which works great in offline
mode. I can do whatever I want with my mails (move them around, reply
to them, delete them) and as soon as I reconnect to the net, the local
modifications are propagated to the server.

When I'm in an Internet cafe, I access my mailboxes through Horde's
IMP client (http://www.horde.org/imp/), which is a pretty nice Web
interface to IMAP servers.

These three clients all interacted pretty well until now, at least I
didn't have any major problems in the previous two years. There are,
however, some minor glitches.

The major one is mail splitting. Gnus, Mail.app and IMP all have ways
to sort mail, but of course they are not compatible. Which means that
you either have to install an IMAP server with server-side splitting,
or have to find another way. I didn't experiment with server-side
splitting, but I fear that the solutions available now (i.e. SIEVE)
are not powerful enough to filter SPAM using external tools
(SpamAssassin or whatever).

I've been thinking about a solution to this problem for some time now,
but did not implement it yet. The idea would be to have an IMAP
splitting client running all the time on my Linux box. The client
would periodically check for new mails, and move it to the appropriate
IMAP folder(s). Then I would disable all rules in all my other
clients, and let them be passive in that respect. The main problem
with writing such a tool is that the IMAP protocol is a real pain to
use. That said, I seem to remember that a client library exists for
Perl.

Another problem is flags. Flags are stored on the IMAP server, of
course, and while most important flags (e.g. "read", "answered", ...)
are standardised, several clients use their own flags. Gnus, for
example, uses a flag called "gnus-expire" to mark expired messages.
Apple's Mail.app uses "NotJunk", "Junk" and "JunkRecorded" flags to
handle spam.

No big deal really, but the fact is that from Mail.app or Horde I
cannot mark mail to be expired by Gnus. And from Gnus I cannot mark
spam in a way recognised by Mail.app (well, with some elisp code I
certainly could).

The third problem (a small one) is special folders. Gnus, Mail.app and IMP
all have their own idea about where to archive sent mails, what to do
with deleted mails, and where to put drafts. Most clients enable you
to configure the IMAP folder to use for these tasks, though, so it's a
minor issue really.

Michel.