[Techtalk] Using Evolution and Pine

[David Sumbler]

Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com> writes:

> On Sunday 29 October 2006 12:14, Mary Gardiner wrote:
>> On Sun, Oct 29, 2006, David Sumbler wrote:
>> > Does anyone know if any of the text-based e-mail clients, such as the
>> > ones I have mentioned, are suitable to use in conjunction with
>> > Evolution (but not at the same time, of course)?  Obviously their mail
>> > file format needs to be the same as Evolution's, and I don't want one
>> > program to screw things up for the other.
>> 
>> I believe mutt and Evolution can both read the Maildir format. Honestly
>> though, the most common way to get two different mail clients to share a
>> mail account is to get them both to talk to it via IMAP which handles
>> locking and such on the server.
>> 
>
> Another option, if you're using POP mail, is set your accounts to 'leave mail 
> on server.' Then you'll have duplication between the two mail clients, and 
> they probably won't stay synchronized with each other, but at least you won't 
> lose any mail. You'll have to remember to delete messages from the server 
> occasionally. It won't matter if you use maildirs or mbox, since the two 
> clients are independent of each other. 
>
> I do this on the occasions when I'm traveling and need access to email. I 
> don't care for Webmail, so I set up a mail client on my laptop and do 
> the 'leave mail on server' hack. I also is copy sent-mail to myself so I have 
> copies on both mail clients. It's rather kludgy, but it does the job.

It certainly sounds a bit kludgy!  I have tried copying sent-mail to
myself when using webmail, but I find it all a bit frustrating and
unsatisfactory.

In any case, I think I'd like a system which works a bit more
seamlessly than this appears to.

The IMAP option, though, sounds as if it might be the answer.  I know
hardly anything about IMAP, so I have been trying to find out a bit.

One page I found on the web was suggesting downloading mail from the
ISP's mail server, and then runnng an IMAP server on my own computer.
That way I could use my existing Procmail filters etc.  But, from the
little I know, I could probably do some filtering and sorting even on
the remote server, couldn't I?  So running my own server is perhaps an
unnecessary complication.  What does anyone else think?

David

-- 

david at aeolia.co.uk