Best way to share Thunderbird Profiles across multiple machines.

[Albert Charron]

damian wrote:
> Albert Charron wrote:
>> I would definitely recommend using a mail server for this... On one 
>> of your Ubuntu machine, setup courrier-imap or dovecot and fetchmail...
>>
>> That's the way I'm doing it for years now and I haven't got any 
>> problems...
>>
>> Basically, fetchmail will get the e-mails from your ISP (pop3) and 
>> your thunderbirds will connect to your imap server
>>
> I'm very interested in this. I've never heard of it before.
>
> I'm still using POP email because I like having all of my emails on my 
> machine rather than on some third party computer. I also want to work 
> with my emails when I'm travelling on my laptop and not online so I am 
> currently synchronising profiles over several computers using unison.
>
> This works quire well, but is a bit of a pain if I just want to send a 
> quick email from one machine but have to synchronise everything first!
>
> How easy is this to set up? I considered myself a geek when I was a 
> windows user. Now I feel quite lacking in geekness since I moved over 
> to Linux and I really don't want to mess up all my email.
>
> What would be the best/easiest program to use from the ones you have 
> mentioned?
>
> Cheers
> Damian
This setup is pretty easy to setup. There are a lot of tutorials online 
for that as stated by Mark Haney. For me, this setup was done YEARS ago 
(in 2004-2005 I think) and had followed me through a migration from 
another distro to Ubuntu 6.06 and now 8.04.

My exact setup is the following:

fetchmail get the e-mails from my various mail accounts and send them to 
postfix for local processing. Postfix then uses procmail sends the mail 
through spamassassin (spam filtering - this might not be the best 
practice now, I think postfix can use spamassassin directly now, but I'm 
not sure) and server side filtering/sorting (for example, mails from the 
various mailing lists are directly sent to their directories on the 
server. Thunderbird then connects to Dovecot through IMAP (when I'm at 
home) or IMAPS (secure IMAP, when I'm not on my network). I also have 
SquirrelMail that connects to the IMAP server too, which gives me a web 
access to my mails from anywhere...

This setup might be overkill, I must admit, but it works great for 
me...  I think the only needed parts are Fetchmail, Dovecot and Postfix. 
The other are only "candy" to add on the package ;)

-- 
+--------------------------------------+
  Albert Charron
+--------------------------------------+
  Linux Counter member #157482
  Registered computers: 387105, 387106
+--------------------------------------+

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