e-mail sync options?

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Ben Eisenbraun <bene at klatsch.org> writes:
>
> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 11:14:59AM -0400, Joshua Judson Rosen wrote:
> > _What I want_:
> > 
> > I'd like to be able to offline have access to my entire e-mail store
> > from all devices--be able to search through and read messages, write
> > messages and queue them for sending, move messages between folders,
> > set/change flags on messages--and then have everything sync-up every
> > which way when I go online: I want messages that have been queued for
> > sending to be sent, I want messages that were already in the store(s)
> > to have changes to their flags propagated, and I want new inbound
> > messages to be retrieved and cached locally. Basically, I want
> > everything mirrored everywhere, and I don't want to have to think
> > about *where* something last changed.
> 
> This is what OfflineIMAP was written for:
> 
> http://wiki.github.com/jgoerzen/offlineimap/
> 
> Here's an old Linux Journal article by the author talking about why he
> wrote and walking through some initial set up:
> 
> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7232
> 
> Have fun.  :-)

Thanks, Ben--any thoughts on the `sync topology' question, since
I've got 4+ machines where I want the mail-store kept in sync?

If I can sync between machines on the same LAN segment when possible,
and synch the laptop or handheld to the server in the sky when I'm
off-lan, and then sync the laptop and the handheld to each other,
and so forth..., then it seems like that'd be a win in terms of
sync-speed (it's much faster to sync my laptop directly to my desktop
the 100T than it is to sync either with the server in the sky,
especially if I have to sync one with the sky-server and then
the other with the one...; and it's *much* faster to sync the FreeRunner
with anything local than over the GPRS link). But I know that
tools that are just designed to sync pairwise can be utterly
confused/broken by complex sync-topologies (so when I sync my files
with Unison, for example, I normally just use a star topology--
and an eager one at that).

Also, is it reasonable to start/stop offlineimap in my ifup/ifdown scripts,
to have it keep a `running sync' while I'm online?

How come systems don't do this by default? ;)

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."