Sharing my mail with my laptop

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2008-05-23 at 09:56 -0600, Chris Kottaridis wrote:
> OK, for years I have always worked from a desktop, but now I have a
> laptop in the house as well. Both are running Fedora 8. I'd like to be
> able to look at my mail folders from either host, both new incoming mail
> and previously read mail. My understanding is that with imap I can do
> that.
> 
> I have always had things setup so that my desktop pops down email from
> my local mail server and I let evolution do that and manage the local
> folders. But, now I want my laptop to be able to access my email also
> and I don't want to end up with some email on the laptop and some on the
> desktop so I want to move away from a pop setup. My understanding is
> that imap will allow two different hosts to access a common set of
> folders so I assume I want to move away from pop to an imap setup.
> 
> Currently, my mail server is a FreeBSD machine running an old release
> 5.3. It's running sendmail and dropping new email into /var/mail/chrisk
> folder. My desktop and laptop are Fedora core 8. For the desktop I use
> evolution to pop down the email and sort it into various folders.
> 
> There is a imap daemon on the FreeBSD machine that I seem to be able to
> connect to, but when I tell evolution, on either my desktop or my
> laptop, to treat the FreeBSD as an imap server I don't seem to get any
> new mail transferred. I am wondering if there is more setup required on
> the mail server to get imap running so that I can manage folders on the
> server from either my desktop or my laptop.

Is the IMAP daemon set up to receive your mail from your upstream
server? Unless you do that, it's not going to have any mail to serve to
your clients. It sounds like you haven't actually configured it yet.

> I seem to be missing something on how to set things up so I can peruse
> my email, and control various folders, from either my desktop or my
> laptop. Any pointers on how I get started would be great. I am more then
> happy to make my desktop my mail server, since the FreeBSD server is
> getting a bit old and I'd like to upgrade it anyway so it's not a
> problem for me to just move the mail service to my desktop if that makes
> things easier. I don't care so much if my existing email folders are not
> accessible by my laptop I just want to start making new messages
> available to both from here forward.
> 
> Any pointers to how I get imap setup so I can access my folders from
> two, or more, different machines ?

Details depend on what the IMAP server is. The usual suspects are Cyrus,
Courier, Dovecot or UW but of course each of them has its own magic. If
you start by finding out which one it is, I'm sure plenty of people can
help you configure it. Once you configure IMAP correctly, the other
things you mention will fall into place naturally.

Alternatively, if your provider offers an IMAP option, you could just
use that and eliminate the local mail server. That's what I do (with
several providers including Gmail).

poc