Sharing Thunderbird Mails Between Linux and Windows

[Manish Kathuria]

In order to make the same set of emails accessible on both Windows XP 
Home and Fedora Core on my dual boot laptop, I have created a separate 
FAT32 partition which I use just for storing the Thunderbird mail files 
and directories. While working on Linux I mount this partition through 
an appropriate entry in /etc/fstab and have configured the Thunderbird 
profile in Linux in such a manner that it points to the files and 
directories on this mounted FAT32 filesystem for accessing mails for 
different accounts. I also make sure that I am using the same version of 
Thunderbird on Windows and Linux.

Things had been working perfectly fine except for some small hitches but 
recently after I compacted the mail folders and deleted trash while 
working on Linux, the whole partition got corrupted and a number of 
mails were lost. Though I was able to repair the FAT32 mail partition 
and recover most of the files, its created some doubts in my mind 
regarding this whole arrangement and robustness of FAT32 filesystem 
under Linux.

Has anyone tried something similar ? Its important for me to have the 
mails accessible in Windows as well as Linux but not at the cost of data 
corruption and loss. What all can be done to make this arrangement more 
stable and robust and prevent any data corruption ?

I would really appreciate some suggestions or pointers in this regard.

Thanks,

Manish

[Jacques B.]

> Has anyone tried something similar ? Its important for me to have the
> mails accessible in Windows as well as Linux but not at the cost of data
> corruption and loss. What all can be done to make this arrangement more
> stable and robust and prevent any data corruption ?
>
> I would really appreciate some suggestions or pointers in this regard.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Manish
>
> --
> fedora-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

Your idea sounds quite good.  I hadn't thought of that.  I suppose you
could use a thumb drive instead of a partition on a hard drive. 
Personally I simply set one of them to not remove the messages off the
server.  I realize that means retrieveing them twice, and the sent
messages are not mirrored on the other system.  But on the plus side
it would give redundancy...

Jacques

[Manish Kathuria]

Jacques B. wrote:
> > Has anyone tried something similar ? Its important for me to have the
> > mails accessible in Windows as well as Linux but not at the cost of data
> > corruption and loss. What all can be done to make this arrangement more
> > stable and robust and prevent any data corruption ?
> >
> > I would really appreciate some suggestions or pointers in this regard.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Manish
> >
> > --
> > fedora-list mailing list
> > [e-mail]
> > To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
>
> Your idea sounds quite good.  I hadn't thought of that.  I suppose you
> could use a thumb drive instead of a partition on a hard drive. 
> Personally I simply set one of them to not remove the messages off the
> server.  I realize that means retrieveing them twice, and the sent
> messages are not mirrored on the other system.  But on the plus side
> it would give redundancy...
>
> Jacques

In order for the thumb drive to be accessible on both Linux and Windows, 
the thumb drive partition needs to be FAT32 and it could run into 
similar problems as the hard disk partition. Moreover the large mail 
volume makes it impossible to keep them on the server.

[Robin Laing]

Manish Kathuria wrote:
> Jacques B. wrote:
> > > Has anyone tried something similar ? Its important for me to have the
> > > mails accessible in Windows as well as Linux but not at the cost of data
> > > corruption and loss. What all can be done to make this arrangement more
> > > stable and robust and prevent any data corruption ?
> > >
> > > I would really appreciate some suggestions or pointers in this regard.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > >
> > > Manish
> > >
> > > -- 
> > > fedora-list mailing list
> > > [e-mail]
> > > To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
> >
> > Your idea sounds quite good.  I hadn't thought of that.  I suppose you
> > could use a thumb drive instead of a partition on a hard drive. 
> > Personally I simply set one of them to not remove the messages off the
> > server.  I realize that means retrieveing them twice, and the sent
> > messages are not mirrored on the other system.  But on the plus side
> > it would give redundancy...
> >
> > Jacques
>
> In order for the thumb drive to be accessible on both Linux and Windows, 
> the thumb drive partition needs to be FAT32 and it could run into 
> similar problems as the hard disk partition. Moreover the large mail 
> volume makes it impossible to keep them on the server.

How about using an ext2 partition and this software.?

http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html

[Andy Burns]

Manish Kathuria wrote:
> In order to make the same set of emails accessible on both Windows XP 
> Home and Fedora Core on my dual boot laptop

Do you have the option of leaving them on the server at all times and 
accessing them using IMAP4? If so you can also point a webmail client at 
the server when you have neither the home or laptop PC to hand ...

[Manish Kathuria]

Andy Burns wrote:
> Manish Kathuria wrote:
> > In order to make the same set of emails accessible on both Windows XP 
> > Home and Fedora Core on my dual boot laptop
>
> Do you have the option of leaving them on the server at all times and 
> accessing them using IMAP4? If so you can also point a webmail client at 
> the server when you have neither the home or laptop PC to hand ...

Not really. I have limited space per account and moreover the archived 
mails are now almost 1 GB. I just want to make this work smoothly.

[Dan Book]

Manish Kathuria wrote:
> Andy Burns wrote:
> > Manish Kathuria wrote:
> > > In order to make the same set of emails accessible on both Windows 
> > > XP Home and Fedora Core on my dual boot laptop
> >
> > Do you have the option of leaving them on the server at all times and 
> > accessing them using IMAP4? If so you can also point a webmail client 
> > at the server when you have neither the home or laptop PC to hand ...
>
> Not really. I have limited space per account and moreover the archived 
> mails are now almost 1 GB. I just want to make this work smoothly.

I used to do this also, but have since just put them on my linux 
partition because 1. I rarely use windows on this machine anymore, 2. I 
hate FAT32, and 3. Thunderbird would have to rebuild summaries or 
something every time I opened a folder for the first time (including on 
startup). If I was to still share it, though, I would do what I'm now 
doing on my desktop: make the FAT32 partition into an ext2 partition, 
and get the driver for windows at http://www.fs-driver.org . Excellent, 
easy to use, minimal problems, and I don't think you'd have any of the 
issues of FAT32's suckiness. ;) You could also make it ext3, but either 
way Windows would use it as an ext2 (w/o journaling for filesystem 
stability).
-Dan

[Manish Kathuria]

Dan wrote:
> I used to do this also, but have since just put them on my linux 
> partition because 1. I rarely use windows on this machine anymore, 2. I 
> hate FAT32, and 3. Thunderbird would have to rebuild summaries or 
> something every time I opened a folder for the first time (including on 
> startup). If I was to still share it, though, I would do what I'm now 
> doing on my desktop: make the FAT32 partition into an ext2 partition, 
> and get the driver for windows at http://www.fs-driver.org . Excellent, 
> easy to use, minimal problems, and I don't think you'd have any of the 
> issues of FAT32's suckiness. ;) You could also make it ext3, but either 
> way Windows would use it as an ext2 (w/o journaling for filesystem 
> stability).
> -Dan

Thanks, I didnt know about this driver. Will check it out. I hope it 
wont create a mess on the partition.

[Neil Bird]

Around about 29/03/06 05:03, Manish Kathuria typed ...
> Thanks, I didnt know about this driver. Will check it out. I hope it 
> wont create a mess on the partition.

I had something similar once (for pics., not mail, though), and if the 
driver supports it you might want to think about mounting/mapping the ext3 
into windows read-only, just to be safe :)

[James Wilkinson]

Manish Kathuria wrote:
> In order to make the same set of emails accessible on both Windows XP
> Home and Fedora Core on my dual boot laptop, I have created a separate
> FAT32 partition which I use just for storing the Thunderbird mail
> files and directories. While working on Linux I mount this partition
> through an appropriate entry in /etc/fstab and have configured the
> Thunderbird profile in Linux in such a manner that it points to the
> files and directories on this mounted FAT32 filesystem for accessing
> mails for different accounts. I also make sure that I am using the
> same version of Thunderbird on Windows and Linux.
>
> Things had been working perfectly fine except for some small hitches
> but recently after I compacted the mail folders and deleted trash
> while working on Linux, the whole partition got corrupted and a number
> of mails were lost.  Though I was able to repair the FAT32 mail
> partition and recover most of the files, its created some doubts in my
> mind regarding this whole arrangement and robustness of FAT32
> filesystem under Linux.

Ouch. This is one of the big problems with a traditional Unix mailbox:
when the mailbox gets large, programs have to do large amounts of
re-ordering and rewriting to delete e-mails, and there's a lot of scope
for things to go wrong.

But I'm still surprised that the FAT32 filesystem was the problem. I
can't recall an occasion when that gave any problems. Have you checked
smartctl -l error /dev/hda (assuming that it's an IDE disk)? Have you
checked memtest86? I *have* experienced problems with disk and memory...

One other thing -- the mailbox was well under 2GB large, wasn't it?

Have you considered a rsync arrangement to keep known-good copies of
your mailboxes? This would involve more diskspace, but would give you a
certain amount of backup.

(And please tell me you've re-examined your backup routines!)

James (using maildir).

[Anne Wilson]

On Wednesday 29 March 2006 13:15, James Wilkinson wrote:
> Ouch. This is one of the big problems with a traditional Unix mailbox:
> when the mailbox gets large, programs have to do large amounts of
> re-ordering and rewriting to delete e-mails, and there's a lot of scope
> for things to go wrong.
>
> But I'm still surprised that the FAT32 filesystem was the problem. I
> can't recall an occasion when that gave any problems. Have you checked
> smartctl -l error /dev/hda (assuming that it's an IDE disk)? Have you
> checked memtest86? I *have* experienced problems with disk and memory...

Unrelated to mail, but I had a bad experience once with FAT32 partitions.  I 
had some left over from dual-boot days, and filled them mainly with photos.  
I had a cpu-fan failure that took out the motherboard.  When I rebuilt I 
found that the ext3 partitions were fine, but the FAT32 ones were completely 
hosed.  I tried every recovery tool I could find, recovering some files, but 
losing every .jpg on there.

I've never trusted a vfat partition since.

I note that man pages regarding partitioning tell you to let windows format 
partitions to be used by windows, and linux to format partitions to be used 
by linux.  I think that says it all.

Anne

[James Wilkinson]

Anne Wilson wrote:
> I had a cpu-fan failure that took out the motherboard.  When I rebuilt I 
> found that the ext3 partitions were fine, but the FAT32 ones were completely 
> hosed.  I tried every recovery tool I could find, recovering some files, but 
> losing every .jpg on there.
>
> I've never trusted a vfat partition since.

You know, it would be a lot more logical not to trust CPU fans...

Modern CPUs are provided with fans for a reason. Some CPUs are better
than others at halting the system when the fan fails -- it sounds like
you experienced quite a bit of collateral damage.

In particular, you can't trust a CPU to work as designed in such cases,
and any writes to disk are dodgy.

Actually, come to think of it, not trusting computers or *any*
filesystems would also be a logical conclusion.

At least, not trusting them enough that you run regular backups.

James.

[Anne Wilson]

On Wednesday 29 March 2006 17:41, James Wilkinson wrote:
> > I've never trusted a vfat partition since.
>
> You know, it would be a lot more logical not to trust CPU fans...

The fact remains that I lost nothing from the ext3 partitions.
> Modern CPUs are provided with fans for a reason. Some CPUs are better
> than others at halting the system when the fan fails -- it sounds like
> you experienced quite a bit of collateral damage.

Actually, I think it's truer to say that some motherboards are better at 
halting the system when a fan fails.  If it had been the only system in the 
room I might have saved it by manual intervention, but I mis-heard the source 
and hit the wrong shutdown button.
> In particular, you can't trust a CPU to work as designed in such cases,
> and any writes to disk are dodgy.
>
> Actually, come to think of it, not trusting computers or *any*
> filesystems would also be a logical conclusion.
>
> At least, not trusting them enough that you run regular backups.

I'm sure you have met Murphy and his cousid Sod ;-)  Almost everything was 
backed up, but the newest set of holiday photos wasn't.

Anne

[Javier Perez]

I do not know if this qualifies as an option, but I use a second server with
IMAP.
All my mail goes there and I set thunderbird from either windows or linux
to use that server as the mail source and to send everything through it.

One advantage is that it gets all my mail during the day and does the spam
filtering without occupying my main machine. Maybe it's overkill, but then
again, if Ihave a spare server around, why not use it?

Javier

On 3/29/06, Anne Wilson  wrote:
> On Wednesday 29 March 2006 17:41, James Wilkinson wrote:
> > > I've never trusted a vfat partition since.
> >
> > You know, it would be a lot more logical not to trust CPU fans...
>
> The fact remains that I lost nothing from the ext3 partitions.
> > Modern CPUs are provided with fans for a reason. Some CPUs are better
> > than others at halting the system when the fan fails -- it sounds like
> > you experienced quite a bit of collateral damage.
>
> Actually, I think it's truer to say that some motherboards are better at
> halting the system when a fan fails.  If it had been the only system in
> the
> room I might have saved it by manual intervention, but I mis-heard the
> source
> and hit the wrong shutdown button.
> > In particular, you can't trust a CPU to work as designed in such cases,
> > and any writes to disk are dodgy.
> >
> > Actually, come to think of it, not trusting computers or *any*
> > filesystems would also be a logical conclusion.
> >
> > At least, not trusting them enough that you run regular backups.
>
> I'm sure you have met Murphy and his cousid Sod ;-)  Almost everything was
> backed up, but the newest set of holiday photos wasn't.
>
> Anne
>
> --
> fedora-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

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~~~~ Javier Perez
~~~~   While the night runs
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