[NBLUG/talk] Remote mail access

[Andrew]

Lincoln Peters wrote on Tue, 31 Jan 2006 16:37:46 -0800:

> > 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.

I highly recommend that all who use VNC (or are considering it)
at this time to connect to remote Linux boxen take a look instead
at NX/FreeNX. It kicks VNC @ss in a major way. Think VNC with
compression so good it runs fairly well over a 56k link. And
that's *with* SSH encryption (VNC is unencrypted). I still have
dialup at home and when I go out of town I use NX to connect back
to my home machine to do various tasks, including collecting,
reading, and sending email. Everything stays on the home box. No
worries about syncing. VNC over such a link would be almost
useless.

NX is being developed by the guys at NoMachine
( http://www.nomachine.com/ ) for their commercial NX servers, but
they've graciously GPLed the core technology, which is what makes
the FreeNX server ( http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) possible. Use
FreeNX as your server (.debs and .rpms can be found) and grab one
of NoMachine's free clients (Linux, Solaris, OS X, Windows,
Zaurus, iPAQ, and PlayStation2 versions available) to connect to
it. Also, both server and client are included in recent versions
of Knoppix.

LinuxJournal has a seven-part series on NX. The first article is
here: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8477  Search the LJ
site for the rest.

For DynDNS.org updating, I use ipcheck.py (it's in Debian). Nice
little script that's easy to use. Since I'm still on dialup, I
have a small bash script in /etc/ppp/ip-up.d/ that invokes
ipcheck so that it does its thing whenever the PPP link is
brought up.

A.