Re: New to linux on laptops - A few Q's

[Seth Golub <seth@thehouse.org>]

Steve Robbins <steve@nyongwa.montreal.qc.ca> writes:

> When I travel, I turn off my home machine, and have the laptop
> masquerade as it, so as to receive email on the laptop.  That's fine
> until I return home.  Now I have to merge all these mail folders.

I copy everything onto my laptop so that when it becomes the active
mail machine, it's also the master keeper of all mail files.  I
manually set which system is in charge of mail, and its files clobber
the ones on the other system when I sync them.

When I just go out for a day or two and leave my home machine on and
pulling my mail down, my laptop isn't the master of my mail, so I Bcc
myself (with fully-qualified, non-local address) to archive outgoing
mail I write while offline.

There are two drawbacks to my setup:

 1) When I go out for the day, I may make changes to my mail folders
    and spools.  When I return, those changes are lost.  I do this
    because it's critical that I not lose new mail in the spools at
    home, and I'm happy being overly cautious in this case.

 2) If I pull down mail on my laptop and resync with my desktop
    machine without setting my laptop to be the master mail machine, I
    will lose mail.  Similarly, if after I return and sync I forget to
    set my desktop machine to be the mail master, I'll lose mail when
    I sync with the laptop.  I haven't had any problems yet because
    I've been careful enough and don't fetch mail from my laptop
    often.  The vulnerability could be fixed with some locks and
    script changes, but as I'm ditching my desktop machine in a couple
    weeks, I won't have to worry about it anymore.