[NBLUG/talk] Remote mail access

Lincoln Peters sampln at sbcglobal.net
Tue Jan 31 16:37:46 PST 2006


On Tuesday 31 January 2006 16:14, Dave Sisley wrote:
> Three possibilities jump quickly to mind:
>
>    1. Mutt (or some other console based mail program) - I used it for a
>       long time and was very pleased with it.  Since you can ssh into
>       your desktop, you could do that and view your mail right there.

That might work, although I still would need to set up fetchmail and DynDNS, 
and I would need to ensure that mutt and KMail (which I use now) don't step 
on each other's toes.

I liked the idea of using eGroupware because every public terminal has a web 
browser, but not every public terminal has an SSH client.  But I don't know 
if that would ever come up, since I only foresee trying to connect from my 
laptop or from a lab computer at SSU (most of which dual-boot Linux).

>    2. Set up Thunderbird on your laptop to check your SBC pop accounts,
>       but configure the program on your laptop to leave messages on the
>       server.  This is how I check my work email accounts from home,
>       ensuring that all incoming messages are stored on my work
>       machine.  I see that this option would mean that you could not see
>       messages that you'd already read on your home machine.

This wouldn't really offer me anything that SBC's webmail thingy doesn't 
offer...except that I could build a partial archive of my e-mails on my 
laptop (which would probably be a confusing enough swiss cheese kind of deal 
to be worse than the webmail thingy).

>    3. VNC - I use this sometimes to respond to work emails so that my
>       response is sitting in my work box, rather than my home machine.
>       By this I mean that I will get on my desktop at work via VNC and
>       run Thunderbird from there to respond to an email.  Both this and
>       option #1 would allow you to read email that you had already read
>       but are stored on your home box.

This might be simpler, but I'd be worried about the bandwidth requirements.


-- 
Lincoln Peters
<sampln at sbcglobal.net>

What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away.

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