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Re: [Nmh-workers] Sharing MH files across computers

2016-09-01 16:41:46
Hi Thomas,

Thomas> I want to access the same mails from both my laptop computer and my
Thomas> desktop computer.

I've been doing this for a decade or two, among three computers for much
of that time: home desktop, work desktop and laptop.  I use unison for
syncing between hosts: it's much safer than rsync since it's
bidirectional.  However, that's still not good enough when both sides
are reordering or storing new messages.  So for most of this time I
further adopted your solution of different drafts and inbox folders on
each host, along with fairly careful sync discipline whenever I was
doing a lot of refiling.  This kindof requires one host to be always on,
as the centre of the sync topology.

More recently I've set up a couple of aliases which perform the complete
email migration between two hosts: shut down fetchmail on one, sync,
start fetchmail on the other.  Even with this I'm now tempted to perform
additional futzing to disable any NMH commands which alter message
numbers on the non-primary hosts.  I've been contemplating trying out
some kind of IMAP server on my NAS box too: that is pretty much always
on, but IMAP'd leave me in trouble when offline.

I like your modulus idea, though it would run into difficulty with
folder -pack I think; another idea would be for emails to have a
deterministic filename that couldn't change (e.g. a hash — though I note
that "Replied:" annotations would cause trouble here), but scan etc.
would assign virtual numbers to them by some means so you could still
refer to 1, 2, etc. rather than a 20-digit hash :-/  Sounds as if it
might get awkward though.

Would be interested to hear if anyone has tried other approaches.

Conrad

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