The UIDL feature of RFC1725 may be capable of this (syncing
multiple clients to a POP server. I don't know the details: I only
know what I infer from the fetchmail man page. It describes it, in
combination with -keep, as a way "to use a mailbox as a baby news drop
for a group of users". The server whould have to have a POP3
supporting this, and you'ld have to be willing to keep all the stuff
that hasn't already been delivered everywhere that you want it on the
common server. My guess is that it works by having the POP server
send a "List" of what's available with "Unique IDs", the client keeps
track of what it has already fetched (~/.fetchids), and only fetches
what it needs. I don't know if the reference to "group of users"
means that you need multiple accounts on the server, but I doubt it.
You would want to clean things out on the server occasionally,
so that the list wouldn't get to huge, telling you about messages that
everyone already has at each connect (also if your server limits your
storage or charges you for it). I don't know if you can do that by
UIDL as well. If not, and you're stuck with fetching again with
-nokeep, then there is the potential for messages delivered since the
last time everybody syncs only showing up on the machine doing the
purge, but since it's only you, you could do this at a controlled time
and manually distribute these few messages.
It seems to me that a better solution would be to have the
message ID be a monotonicly increasing value, like the date/time that
it arrived at the server mailbox, and to provide tools saying things
like "give me what's "newer" than X", which avoids having to transmit
a list each time, and "flush everything older than Y", which
eliminates the race at cleanup (though knowing Y as a function of the
last sync data for the least recently sunk client would still be
manual). It could be that the UIDL is such a value (I don't know),
but there don't seem to be any appropriate switches on my fetchmail
man page, and if it were in the protocol, I suspect that fetchmail
would have it.
Good luck, Bill
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