[plug] Overly mobile mail solution

[Paul Antoine]

50 accounts!! What the hell were you thinking... hehe. I've not used 
Cyrus IMAP for replication but have a friend who has so I'll ask and 
forward his advice.

Offline access to email is always a pain in the neck but so often also 
very useful so I like your suggested solution!  Might have to try it 
myself :-)

Anyway, I'll get back to you and the list with anything I find from my 
esteemed friend who's just gone through server replication hell :-)

P.


Brad Campbell wrote:
> G'day all,
> 
> I'm starting to reach the limit of my current mail config scalability.
> At the moment I'm running thunderbird on my laptop. This has accounts 
> for 8 pop servers and has over 50 mail filtering rules. I use a single 
> SMTP server to send mail from all the accounts via an OpenVPN link from 
> wherever I happen to be. I generally get about 1000 mails per day.
> 
> My issues are :
> 
> A) My connections are often laggy and unreliable enough that my pop3 
> sessions time out (I do a lot of work on various sites with lousy loaded 
> connections). When I have 1000 mails to download this causes problems 
> like duplicated messages and filter mistakes in thunderbird, 
> notwithstanding the time required to just get the messages if I happen 
> to be on a slow link.
> 
> B) Sending e-mail (particularly large ones) tends to be very slow on 
> laggy links, and while I have a tcp connection open (smtp or pop) 
> thunderbird beats the living daylights out of my cpu.
> 
> C) I have to use my laptop for my mail, even when I'm at home and have 
> access to a nice fast machine with a big screen (laptop is 11.1"). I 
> have resorted to using thunderbird on the laptop over a remote X 
> connection to my desktop to give me more screen realestate.
> 
> I have thought about this a bit and figured it was time to centralise my 
> mail collection at home where I have a nice quick link using fetchmail, 
> filtering with procmail, spam filtering with spamassassin and 
> accessability with IMAP. In addition to running a local SMTP caching 
> server at home.
> 
> I've been doing some looking about and see that Cyrus IMAP supports 
> replication, so I wondered if I had this all set up at home whether I 
> could run a Cyrus IMAP server on my laptop to access locally and have 
> the servers replicate as they get the chance at their own pace over 
> whatever connectivity is available.
> 
> I know I can run a local smtp spool on my laptop to solve the sending 
> CPU issues, but I wonder if a pair of IMAP servers syncing will solve my 
> mail spool issues?
> 
> The idea of course is to have the home machine 
> fetching/filtering/de-spamming and loading the mail into the IMAP server 
> which I can access while I'm at home, but to also have it replicate to 
> my laptop when it's connected so that I can read my mail wherever I may 
> be. (Sometimes I catch up on a couple of thousand lkml mails at 38,000 
> feet so IMAP over the network would be no use to me).
> 
> I'm not fussed about the mail spool size on my laptop (at any time I 
> generally have about 3G of mail on there anyway), but I'd like to be 
> able to read/delete/archive mail while I'm offline and have it all sync 
> up while downloading anything new when I plug in.
> 
>  From what I see with the brief look I've had at Cyrus replication, it 
> uses a form of journalling/conflict resolution that should allow 
> precisely what I want.
> 
> Has anyone looked into any of this?
> 
> Brad