Re: Best way to share Thunderbird Profiles across multiple machines.

damian wrote:
Albert Charron wrote:

This setup is pretty easy to setup. There are a lot of tutorials online for that as stated by Mark Haney. For me, this setup was done YEARS ago (in 2004-2005 I think) and had followed me through a migration from another distro to Ubuntu 6.06 and now 8.04.

My exact setup is the following:

fetchmail get the e-mails from my various mail accounts and send them to postfix for local processing. Postfix then uses procmail sends the mail through spamassassin (spam filtering - this might not be the best practice now, I think postfix can use spamassassin directly now, but I'm not sure) and server side filtering/sorting (for example, mails from the various mailing lists are directly sent to their directories on the server. Thunderbird then connects to Dovecot through IMAP (when I'm at home) or IMAPS (secure IMAP, when I'm not on my network). I also have SquirrelMail that connects to the IMAP server too, which gives me a web access to my mails from anywhere...

This setup might be overkill, I must admit, but it works great for me... I think the only needed parts are Fetchmail, Dovecot and Postfix. The other are only "candy" to add on the package ;)

Thanks Albert and Mark!

Could you tell me what format the emails are stored on the main home computer, and are they easy to back up. I'd be really worried about breaking something or even not knowing how to retrieve stuff if something broke outside of my control.

And as you both said that there are 'lots' of tutorials on the net, could you recommend a good one?

Thanks again for your guidance.

I've actually not even got networking working properly on these machines yet so I'll be flagging your responses to come back to later.

Oh, one more question:
If I move everything over to this system, what would/could I do with my current emails that are all saved on each machine in thunderbird (downloaded via POP and synchronised using unison).

Thanks
Damian

The e-mails are stored in mbox or Maildir format (your choice, I use Maildir) on the server. To back up my mails, I only copy ~/Maildir folders... As for the mails you currently have in your Thunderbird, when you first connect your profile to the IMAP server, you'll see the folders you have now and the folders (under Local Folders) and the folders on the server. You just have to move or copy the folders from your local to the server using Thunderbird.

Now, for the tutorials, I'm sorry I cannot recommend one right now because as I stated, my setup was done years ago using another Linux distro (Mandrake/Mandriva at the time) and I only copied over and adapted my configuration files. Also, as I remembered, I used multiple tutorials that I "combined" to suit my needs.

Maybe you can start there: http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-ubuntu8.04-lts and use what you need in that (the mail related sections). This guy uses Courrier-IMAP, but you can easily replace Courrier-IMAP with Dovecot if you want to. Both are good IMAP servers. I started with Courrier and migrated to Dovecot when I installed 8.04... I also have another source, but it is in French language. If you want it, I can post it too...

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Albert Charron
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