On Fri, 15 Jun 2007, Nico vd Dussen wrote:
> Luca Bertoncello wrote:
> > exim@??? schrieb:
> >
> >> The boss' hard drive crashed and he lost all his e-mail.
> >>
> >> The request: Keep backups of all emails on the server.
> >
> > This is NOT the best solution!
> >
> > The best solution is to leave the E-Mail on a Server, and read them with
> > IMAP/POP3-leave-on-Server (but IMAP is better!).
>
> I agree that for many cases using IMAP-leave-on-server rather than
> POP3-remove-from server would be the optimal solution.
>
> However, for a person dragging his laptop through Southern Africa, IMAP
> is not an option. Connectivity is simply not reliably available, and
> when it is, it is often at rates like USD 0.50 / MByte and more. One
> needs your e-mail on your laptop for reference when required.
It seems difficult to reconcile the conflicting issues of his mail being
available locally in his machine, and yet protecting it from disk failure
again.
I agree that keeping copies of incoming and outgoing mail (outside of the
normal delivery and sending processes) is probably not really the ideal
solution.
However, an IMAP client like Thunderbird, maybe with appropriate
extensions, will let you specify that the inbox and optionally other
folders, are available on offline mode. That is, mail will actually be
copied from the Inbox, and other folders, through IMAP, so that the copy
of the message is available locally on the machine. When the user
reconnects to a reliable network, the folders are resynchronised.
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/cets/answers/thunderbird-offline.html
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/specs/offline.html
I suppose other IMAP clients may have similar functionality.
Does that help?
Jethro.
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Jethro R Binks
Computing Officer, IT Services
University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
