Accessing mail remotely

[Mitch Thompson]

Dotan Cohen wrote:

>On 2/19/06, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
>  
>
>>Dotan Cohen wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>On 2/19/06, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
>>>      
>>>
>>>>Dotan Cohen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>>>I currently use Thunderbird 1.5 as my mail client at home on my
>>>>>Kubuntu 5.10 system. Often, I find that I need to access my mail at
>>>>>the university. I am trying to decide what options I have available to
>>>>>me:
>>>>>
>>>>>          
>>>>>
>>>>These days, almost every mail server offers IMAP as well as POP.  Can you
>>>>just leave your mail on the university server, and access it via IMAP
>>>>from both home and U?
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>I'd rather not for performance and reliability issues.
>>>      
>>>
>>Performance _could_ be an issue, but there's no reason reliability should.
>>I would argue that your options of VNC and PHP/Apache (how you'd do the
>>latter when you can't install software at the U. is beyond me) are both
>>going to offer their own performance problems.
>>    
>>
>
>The apache and php would be on my local machine. I would access them
>through a web browser.
>
>Dotan
>  
>
My personal setup is that I have fetchmail pulling my email off of my 
ISP's mailserver and storing it in mbox format on my local computer (I 
have a cablemodem account).  Then, I set up the imapd on my home 
computer and turned on the SSL port (993). I then forward access to this 
port through my firewall.  Now, no matter where I am in the world, if I 
can get internet access, I can read my email.

Likewise, if I am on a business trip, I cannot send email through my ISP 
because I am not on the same domain, so I have set up port forwarding 
through SSH on my home computer and forwarded its port through my 
firewall.  If you are interested in doing this, I can send you directly 
instructions for doing this (essentially, all of my config files, after 
scrubbing, of course).

It works very well, uses SSH/SSL, so it is secure, and I don't ever have 
to worry about which computer a certain email is stored on, as I do with 
POP-ping my mail.

As a bonus, this method lends itself very well to having a web-based 
mail system on your home computer (ala Squirrelmail), also accessed 
securely through https:.  I have done this in the past, but after moving 
from SuSE to Kubuntu, I never got around to reinstalling and configuring 
Squirrelmail.

Hope this helps.

Mitch (reading his home email from work -- oops!) ;^)