[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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