reading the same server's mail from different client machines' gnus (with tramp's help?)

[Cyprian Laskowski <cyp@ling.ed.ac.uk>]

Hi,

My primarily email is stored unix-fashion in /var/mail/blahblah on my
university's server, and I usually (but not always) read it by sshing
from my laptop into my university account, running an emacs from
there, from which I read my email with gnus.  This works fine, but it
would be even nicer if I could read my mail from my laptop emacs gnus
directly.  I know that one can set up the mail-sources to do
ssh-fetching stuff, but the thing is, I don't want to actually fetch
the mail onto my laptop, because sometimes I do login on university
machines, and, unlike my laptop, these are always running.  And I
certainly don't want some mail stored on one machine and the rest on
another.  What I'm after instead is a way to sometimes run gnus from
the university machines directly, and sometimes from my laptop, but
for the mail to always be stored on the university machines.  Thus
ideally running 'M-x gnus' should yield identical results (at a
particular time of course) if run from laptop or university machine.
Having passwordless ssh and tramp working on my laptop, I wonder: is
this feasible without too much hassle?

For example, suppose I specify tramp filenames for mail-sources and
mail-source-directory, e.g.,

(setq mail-sources '((file :path "remote.host.blah.blah:/var/mail/blahblah)))
(setq mail-source-directory "remote.host.blah.blah:Mail")

in my laptop emacs config.  But I'm not sure what sort of thing I
would need to do to get *writing* mail to work (e.g., I imagine this
means setting up the mail buffer contents to save on the remote
machine and then invoking the sendmail or whatever commands remotely
somehow, all with one keybinding hopefully)?

Am I on the right track to success here, or am I going to hit a dead
end soon?


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

cyp