Re: Laptop email
Andre Berger wrote:
> Cory Snavely <csnavely@umich.edu> writes:
>
> > This is the *exact* same problem I have. One possible solution I've been
> > kicking around is to set up a low-end server at home with imapd and
> > Apache with mod_roaming (for the address books, etc.)
> >
> > That's a lot of work. To confess, though, I thought it might be fun 8)
> > and good practice.
> >
> > My biggest complaint, though, is that the potato Netscape doesn't seem
> > to have the same "offline reading" capability as the Windows 98 one.
> > Does anybody know about that (why that feature doesn't seem present)?
>
> You just have to use it ;)
It's not *quite* this simple. Unix Netscape (incl. Linux) assumes a persistent net
connection, so it doesn't even have the "go offline" option of the Windows and Mac
versions. I guess the assumption (5-6 years ago) was that nobody would dream of
using Unix on a laptop, or (heaven forbid) a home machine. Hopefully Mozilla will
remedy this.
I've found even if I turn off auto message retrieval on Netscape, it still tries to
do it sometimes when switching folders (!!), and if I've done
"/etc/init.d/networking stop" then Netscape hangs. (If I leave networking "running"
while disconnected, it just times out after a couple of seconds with "no route to
host".)
My laptop has an ethernet card problem such that when I suspend/resume, I have to
remove and reinstall the driver module, which means /etc/init.d/networking stop and
start have to surround rmmod and modprobe. I put this in /etc/apm/resume.d/
Browsing behaves similarly to fetching mail: if networking is down, it hangs,
otherwise times out and displays the version in cache. To browse the cache, there's
always "about:cache", but it includes all files of all types in a big list which is
annoying to look through. (Anyone know of a way to get just a list of HTML page
titles?)
> I have exim to send mail from and fetchmail to download mail to my
> potato box.
This is cool, but (last time I tried it a year ago) fetchmail's POP capabilities
were not quite as advanced as Netscape's. For example, you could leave mail on the
server, but next time you went to fetch it, it would get everything there, including
what you left on the server before, so you'd get multiple copies of what was left
before. Netscape doesn't have this problem, but then it isn't a problem if you
don't leave mail on the server. :-)
Also, Netscape seemed to get messages from the POP server about twice as fast as
fetchmail, over a 56K modem. These fetchmail problems may or may not still be
there.
Of course, using movemail solves the above problem (of hanging when Netscape tries
to get new mail). :-)
> Add shell scripts to /etc/ppp/ip-up.d/ that send and receive
> mail automatically as soon as you go online.
That's pretty cool, thanks for that tip! I'll use that at home. Now if only my
laptop had a modem... :-)
> If you want to send mail,
> always use the "Send" btn (not "Send later"). This will add the
> msg to the exim queue.
Are there any disadvantages to "Send later" aside from not automatically sending it
from the /etc/ppp/ip-up.d script (which only works for PPP users)?
Thanks again,
-Adam P.
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