MJ Ray wrote:
It would probably still require installing a VNC server and a web server, but you might find a Java VNC client. (ow, evil.)
I'm not wanting to "see" TB through a web browser; I'm wanting a web interface to it that's not dissimilar from any other wbemail interface (likely quite a basic one, granted...)
Alternatively if I had a way to make TB expose an IMAP interface to its mail (ie act as IMAP server as well as IMAP client) I could achieve the same thing, either by connecting via IMAP or by installing any webmail that works with IMAP.
The way I look at it, TB is all three of mail collection, mail storage and mail client, it's not just mail client (compared with the likes of (AIUI) mutt, which would work against the users mailstore and not have the responsibility for populating the mailstore, nor tie its user to using it to access that mailstore). 99% of the time TB suits my needs so switching to a different client isn't desirable (in any case unless there's a comparable mail client that does what I need I'm no better off!), but the other 1% I'd like to use a different client to access the same mailstore.
TB uses mbox files for storage, so I could access the files remotely using anything that understands mbox, however I'd have to be 100% sure TB was not running, and I'd lose the mail collection functionality. (If TB used Maildir format it would probably be OK to just run another client, eg webmail, against the same mailstore; maybe that would be a useful "tweak" to TB, although I doubt it would be trivial!)
NB: I'm not expecting this to be native TB functionality, but I wondered if anyone had done this before as an add-on. Searching for such a thing is proving impossible (to me, anyway) because all the keywords (webmail, imap, etc) all crop up regularly with TB in other (far more common) contexts.
I just googled for "Thunderbird maildir" and that's thrown up some interesting conversations (along the lines of "why doesn't TB support..."). What it has suggested is that Evolution natively handles Maildir? If so that might be an option. Anyone here able to tell me more about that?