Best way to share Thunderbird Profiles across multiple machines.

[damian]

Albert Charron wrote:
> 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 ;)
>
Thanks Albert and Mark!

Could you tell me what format the emails are stored on the main home 
computer, and are they easy to back up. I'd be really worried about 
breaking something or even not knowing how to retrieve stuff if 
something broke outside of my control.

And as you both said that there are 'lots' of tutorials on the net, 
could you recommend a good one?

Thanks again for your guidance.

I've actually not even got networking working properly on these machines 
yet so I'll be flagging your responses to come back to later.

Oh, one more question:
If I move everything over to this system, what would/could I do with my 
current emails that are all saved on each machine in thunderbird 
(downloaded via POP and synchronised using unison).

Thanks
Damian