[NBLUG/talk] Remote mail access

Lincoln Peters sampln at sbcglobal.net
Sat Feb 11 22:15:33 PST 2006


Thus far, I've gotten DynDNS and SSH working, so I can log into my computer 
when I'm away from home.  However, I now realize that there is another issue 
that I didn't foresee until now: mailbox locking.

When I set up KMail to access the local mailbox, I noticed that it asked me to 
choose a mailbox locking method, presumably since any attempt to access one 
mailbox with two programs at the same time could lead to data corruption.  
Usually, I leave KMail running on my computer when I'm not there, so there 
would be some risk involved with trying to read the mailbox with another 
program while it's running.

The options that I see are:

* Shut down KMail whenever I leave the house.  This would be the simplest 
solution, but it would take some effort to get into this habit.

* Shut down KMail by remote when I want to check my e-mail by remote, or at 
least somehow disconnect it from the mailbox.  This might not be as simple as 
"killall kmail", since I'm not sure that ANY "kill" signal will cause a clean 
shutdown of KMail.  A quick search of the KMail manual and the KDE website 
offers no insight into the matter.

* Find a mail daemon that IS safe to access from two different programs at the 
same time.  I seem to recall that the IMAP protocol is supposed to allow for 
this, which is part of why I was considering IMAP when I first envisioned 
this project.  However, I've experimented with the uw-imap server in the 
Debian repository, and I can't get it to behave in any sort of predictable 
way (sometimes the login succeeds, sometimes it rejects my password).  And 
Cyrus looks way too complex for my needs.


Any suggestions?


-- 
Lincoln Peters
<sampln at sbcglobal.net>

  Some bird populations soaring down 
	-Headline of an article in 
	 Science News, page 126, February 20, 1993.

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