Accessing mail from everywhere

havresylt · 2010-06-30 11:06:50

I use Thunderbird on my laptop to manage three different mail accounts. All the accounts are accessed through imap, but I usually archive stuff in the local folders. This has worked very well for me thus far.

The problem is though that I realize that Thunderbird is almost the only reason why I keep carrying my laptop around. Most of the other everyday things I do don't really require this specific machine. I use xmarks to get my Firefox bookmarks. I use sshfs to mount my music collection. I use ssh to access files.

There are a number of different solutions:

1) Stop using thunderbird and use some kind of online mail service (e.g. gmail). Of course this makes it perfectly accessible. But I don't really like the idea of having all my mail at some company's server. Also, although I doubt that google's servers will go down, it also feels vulnerable to be unable to back things up. My .thunderbird directory is backed up along with everything else I regularly back up.

2) Have the .thunderbird directory on my server, mount it on the current machine and launch Thunderbird there. The problem with this approach is that Thunderbird has to be the exact same version, otherwise it gets confused at start up and starts indexing all mail again.

3) Run Thunderbird over ssh with X forwarding off of the said server. This works really well, but requires a machine with X server which is not always available (cough windows).

How do you go about accessing your mail?

Dieter@be · 2010-06-30 11:18:02

there are non graphical mail clients.
also, you can make backups from imap servers using imapsync (or a similar tool)
also, you can run your own imap server, using dovecot or something

schuay · 2010-06-30 11:38:59

I use KMail / mutt with a shared dropbox folder to sync mails to all my PCs.

fukawi2 · 2010-06-30 12:39:07

havresylt wrote:

How do you go about accessing your mail?

I use GMail and back it up to my home file server using offlineimap.

My work account is done via IMAP and I just keep everything on the server, but I'm pretty frugal with what mail I keep on my work account since most of my work that I need accountability for is handled by our support ticket system.

vacant · 2010-06-30 15:14:32

I have a domain (123 reg) which forwards email to my main gmail account. Gmail also fetches email from old ISP accounts. You can opt to leave email on the servers if you are paranoid. I have several gmail accounts (ebay/paypal, family) and I have a filter on each of those to forward to my main gmail.

On my laptop, kmail downloads from my main gmail.

So.... gmail should keep a copy of all my email plus kmail has a copy (which gets backed up each week).

Now, if gmail fails then what?

Well, I can point my domains to one of my old ISP email boxes.

Gmail did fail collecting mail a few weeks back but that meant I either had to "check now", get kmail to read my old ISP email boxes, or or just log into my old ISP webmail.

Conclusion: I have ONE gmail account that gets all my email (either pointed to via my domain(s), pulling from non-gmail ISPs, or forwarded from other gmail using filters). Kmail collects from that gmail account. Job done. I do email on kmail but backed up on gmail.

zenlord · 2010-07-01 09:15:36

At my office, I run a dovecot server and with fetchmail I collect all my emailaccounts on that server. Next I registered a free domain at dyndns.org and setup ddclient on the server. I tried a previous version of roundcube, but I failed in configuring it correctly. IlohaMail has got less features and looks kinda outdated, but does the job perfectly.

If you get Roundcube working, you can also make it read your LDAP addressbook, which means you don't have to manually look for emailaddresses anymore (or keep a second addressbook).

Voila. Every pc (or should I say device) that has internet access and a browser is a gateway to your email.

Zl.

havresylt · 2010-08-14 21:58:52

Thanks for all your answers!

I've really been thinking alot about how to do this lately (probably more than what's healthy). A big gain was when I set up an IMAP account on my server for all the archived mails. That way, I'm not dependent on any _files_; at any machine I only have to add all my IMAPs and thus get access to all my mail.

However, having to set up a mail client on every computer from which I want to do mail is not very handy. So I figured I should set up a web mail on my server. I want it to act like Thunderbird in the sense that I don't just want to be able to log in to each one separately, but to handle all of them at the same time (i.e. e.g. move mail between accounts).

Are there any webmail servers that are capable of this? It seems like squirrelmail and roundcube aren't.

rwd · 2010-08-23 15:59:27

Squirrelmail and Roundcube aren't mail servers, just a web gui/front-end. It is up to the front-end whether or not to check all accounts at once and/or present mail from different accounts in one inbox.I use Feng-Office as email web-frontend on my server and it does this quite nicely.

Last edited by rwd (2010-08-23 16:00:56)

Arch Linux

#1 2010-06-30 11:06:50

Accessing mail from everywhere

#2 2010-06-30 11:18:02

Re: Accessing mail from everywhere

#3 2010-06-30 11:38:59

Re: Accessing mail from everywhere

#4 2010-06-30 12:39:07

Re: Accessing mail from everywhere

#5 2010-06-30 15:14:32

Re: Accessing mail from everywhere

#6 2010-07-01 09:15:36

Re: Accessing mail from everywhere

#7 2010-08-14 21:58:52

Re: Accessing mail from everywhere

#8 2010-08-23 15:59:27

Re: Accessing mail from everywhere

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