| OfflineIMAP makes messages and attachments available locally |
| From: linux.com read times: 129 |
Provided by yangyi at 2008-05-06 17:54:33 |
OfflineIMAP allows you to read your email while you are not connected to the Internet. This is great when you are traveling and really need an attachment from a message but cannot connect to the Internet. You can use OfflineIMAP to sync all your email during the night so that it is all instantly available when you wake up. This is a security trade-off -- you gain speed and availability for your email at the expense of having to properly protect the local copy of all the email that is created on your laptop. OfflineIMAP is designed to contact your IMAP servers and create a local copy of your email in maildir format. You then point your mail client at the local maildir tree and use your mail client as normal. OfflineIMAP can then sync any changes, such as which messages you have read and deleted, back to the server. OfflineIMAP performs a bidirectional sync, so new messages from the server are downloaded to your local maildir while any changes you have made locally are sent to the IMAP server. If your email client does not support maildir format, you can use OfflineIMAP to sync email between two IMAP servers and ultimately accomplish the same thing. This scenario is a little more complex, as you need to install an IMAP server on your laptop, tell your email client to connect to the IMAP server on localhost, then use OfflineIMAP to keep the IMAP server on your laptop in sync with your main IMAP server. An alternative is to use OfflineIMAP to sync to a maildir repository as normal and tell your local IMAP server to use that maildir as its email source. This thread contains information on setting up courier-imap locally to serve up your mail. OfflineIMAP packages are available for openSUSE, Ubuntu Gutsy, and from the Fedora 7 and 8 repositories. If no packages exist for your distribution, the documentation provides good information on installation from source. I used OfflineIMAP 5.99.2 from the Fedora 8 repository. Version 5.99.2 does not support the Gmail account type. Version offlineimap-5.99.7 from the Fedora rawhide repository does support Gmail but has another bug relating to directory creation which causes synchronization to fail. For these reasons I would recommend using the IMAP account type and manually configuring it for Gmail until package repositories contain later versions of OfflineIMAP. ...... Please access the below link to view the full content. Original link: http://www.linux.com/feature/133... |
