How should I remotely access my email?
I’ve tried two approaches to email and reading it remotely:
- Some big fat GUI (Outlook, etc.) stores the mail. If I want to
access it remotely, I fire up a Remote Desktop connection and use
that. This seems like overkill to me and I dislike it since I
frequently don’t want or have the fast internet connection for loads
of image caching when all I want is to read some email messages. - Some trim CLI (gnus in xemacs) stores the mail. If I want to
access it remotely, I fire up an SSH connection and use that. This
hits the bandwidth level I’m after, but there are too many things I
don’t know how to do in gnus that I honestly don’t think I’ll spend
the time to learn and don’t feel I should be without (like easy,
effective filtering or export/import).
So I think what I’m after is some way to have two applications access
the same mail backend. If I could, say, use Thunderbird to read mail
while I’m sitting at my computer and pine when I’m connected over ssh,
that would be splendid. But can I do this? Or what is the
recommended setup? I’m positive Linux users deal with this all the
time, right? Or do they all just use pine (or whatever) exclusively?
Adam said,
August 18, 2007 @ 12:00 am
What I used to do was:
* pop off mail from different places to a Linux box
* use spamassassin or dspam for filtering
* run an IMAP/SSL server (dovecot works fine) on the Linux box
Then, I had many choices for reading email:
* (a) read mail locally on the Linux box using Mutt
* (b) read mail remotely by SSH’ing into the Linux box and using Mutt
* (c) read mail remotely using Squirrelmail (PHP email client that runs right on the Linux box)
* (d) read mail remotely using any secure IMAP client
None of the options impacted the others since I was using IMAP.
But I’ve recently switched to gmail because it works fine, it’s easier, and I don’t need to read mail offline.
Patrick said,
August 18, 2007 @ 12:00 am
Nuts…
Now I’m having to reevaluate whether or why I’d not just use gmail, too. I remember writing about this a long time ago and deciding I wanted to keep my mail, but since my disk just crashed and I may have lost all my email with it, maybe gmail really is a better solution? Or at least better than setting up the RAID array I’ve been researching?
Thanks a ton for the ideas though! My webhost already has spamassassin filtering and I’m using squirrelmail. I didn’t think of hooking up my own imap server after retrieving the mail. Looks like I can do that in cygwin but the question again is whether I’d really *want* to. Hmm…