I have what I imagine to be complex, atypical email needs, and I think the solution may include bincimap. Let me start by describing the situation:
Oddly enough? You're not actually describing a particularly complicated, or unusual mail system.
Let's recap:
1. You have a mail server that you need to be able to access from multiple places. This mail server must store your email, and allow you to organize it.
This is what leads you to using an IMAP server, which Binc does for you. Run it on ducks.
2. Some of these computers must be able to do this sort of thing even while offline.
Some mail clients will do this for you, by caching the messages (e.g. Apple's Mail.app - I haven't checked, but I imagine Thunderbird probably does this too). That's probably the easiest way.
3. Those offline computers also should be able to queue up mail for sending while offline.
Again, some mail clients will do this for you. But, with qmail installed on your "toaster" computer, you can configure your home network to send mail through toaster as a relay - that's trivial.
4. Shared addressbook
A bit harder - this is really MUA-dependent. Many support LDAP addressbooks, but this is not easily editable from the MUA, and isn't available offline. My method (I use mutt) is to use cvs to sync up my aliases file, but that's manual. Pine can store that sort of thing on the IMAP server. But neither of those caches messages. I'm unaware of a good solution for this, much less one that supports many different MUAs.
I would like to be able to do all this through mutt, Thunderbird, KMail, and perhaps webmail, where the MUA of choice is a function of my mood. But if I must standardize on one MUA, that's fine too.
Yeah... the message-caching (for offline access) and the addressbook stuff are the key limiting factors.
I'd like to support both users "andy" and "dick" if I can, but if, due to not having root, I can only handle one mailbox, that's fine (dick is satisfied with pop3 from ducks and smtp to the isp).
I'm thinking this would be very difficult for multiple mailboxes from one non-root account.
Alright, this is my plan so far:
I run bincimap on ducks (listening on a nonstandard port) and on toaster. [EMAIL PROTECTED] and ducks imap to ducks's bincimap. chainsaw, monorail, and [EMAIL PROTECTED] imap to toaster's bincimap. When the modem link is up, toaster maildirsync's with ducks.
ducks runs sendmail. [EMAIL PROTECTED] and ducks smtp to ducks, possibly through a ssl'ed tunnel to evade firewalls. Some authentication system is used to prevent open relays.
?
toaster runs qmail. chainsaw, monorail, and blender (at home) smtp to toaster's qmail, which is configured to keep trying to deliver for up to ten minutes (its first attempt may initiate the dial-on-demand). toaster's qmail only accepts smtp from the lo or eth0 interfaces.
Obviously, I don't understand everything involved, and I'm surely missing some important stuff. But is this setup workable? Is this problem solvable? Or even worth solving? Perhaps there's another way around.
I know I'm tired of doing everything through webmail or ssh, and yet pop3'ing doesn't work either because I can't always get to my mail archive. It's time for a change.
Ideas?
Ahh, now we get to the root of it. The real thing you want is offline access, which is easy enough to get from the right MUA. An alternative, that keeps your MUA options open, might be OfflineIMAP (search freshmeat.net for it). I haven't played with it, but it looks like what you're after. That with a local mail relay (like qmail) is probably all you need. The only thing you won't have is a shared addressbook, and good luck on that score. So, binc on ducks, offlineimap on toaster, qmail on toaster, and you're probably pretty much set.
~Kyle
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