[ILUG] A (?) naive solution to accessing work email from home

[kevin lyda]

On Sat, Nov 30, 2002 at 10:31:41AM +0000, Ronan Waide wrote:
> On November 29, kevin+dated+1039020949.edc648 at ie.suberic.net said:
> > i'm not going to convert my mail archives to maildir.  i've got over
> > 150,000 messages.  they currently take up 200 inodes and 300+megs.
> > maildir would inflate both those numbers.
> In all honesty, with diskspace at the current prices and the fact that

the server my mail is on is a compaq proliant server.  disks for that
are more expensive.

regardless, my current setup works 99.9% of the time.  to a large degree
i've used this setup for over 10 years (bar a small departure to mh for
a few years).  in fact the last time i *only* had web access was over
a year ago.

so going out and buying more disk, reorganising my mail, changing the
format of many of my mail folders *just* to use an application that i
might use for ten minutes a year is, well, stupid.  for all that effort,
i might as well write an imap server[0] and offer it up to people.
yes it's more effort, but it seems more worthwhile then 10 minutes
(at best) of email access per year.

> to be frugal with disk space, but it's a shame to throw away useful
> tools like IMAP because of it.

and i'm not saying i want to throw away imap.  i'm saying that current
imap implementations force you to do things their way.  the uw guy
has a philosophical objection to maildir.  the courier people have an
objection to mbox.  cyrus have their own db.  none of them support the
user organising their mail files in a per user configurable way.

all that said, i'm *not* going to go through imap when my disk is local
(or nfs mounted on a 100mb/s network).  that's just silly.  that's like
flying from boston to atlanta via chicago.  yes, people do it, but it
just seems needlessly wastful.  (to update for european geography - but
not flight schedules - it's like flying from dublin to madrid via berlin)

kevin

[0] cpan has a pop3 server, imap client and several mailbox parsing
    utilities, but no imap server implementations.  so it will take
    longer then i thought.

-- 
kevin at ie.suberic.net          dante hicks: but you hate people.
fork()'ed on 37058400         randal graves: yes, but i love gatherings.
meatspace place: home                        isn't it ironic?
http://ie.suberic.net/~kevin       --clerks