Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk wrote: [...]

I have seriously considered setting up postfix, fetchmail, courier, etc

• it might be useful as an end in itself, but is overkill for what I

want. Eg: if my Dad wants access to his email while away from home I stand a better chance of getting him to install a TB add-on than a mail server!

It would probably still require installing a VNC server and a web server, but you might find a Java VNC client. (ow, evil.)

Someone might be able to build something on top of the POW -- Plain Old Webserver extension, but I can't see anything complete.

I suspect it would be as well to copy/redirect email to an IMAP service and access that with a web mail or a portable client. Opening a domestic machine up to remote access seems risky.

Regards,

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?

Jonathan McDowell wrote:

I know you've objected to the previous suggestion of an IMAP server, but it really does sound like what you want.

It was a pretty mild objection; I'd like to avoid it if I can but it's the obvious way to do things, and may be the only way. I do come back to the point that in would find it useful to be able to do this for other people, with less PC expertise and with a lesser OS, but that's a side issue as my own mail is more important anyway :-)

It would be in keeping with the Unix way of doing things if the functions of TB were separated out a little so that it dropped mail into a Maildir structure and/or it viewed mail from that same structure, so I could (if I chose) use something other than TB to fetch the mail, and I could (as I'm trying to do here) use something other than TB to view the mail. To TB's credit they do currently use mbox rather than something unique to TB, but it's a shame they picked mbox over Maildir (actually mbox is probably better for most people, but supporting both would be great for everyone!)

Wayne Stallwood wrote:

Sorry I haven't followed this thread all the way through so the question has probably already been asked, what is the advantage of doing this over say configuring fetchmail to drop your mail into IMAP folders and using any client(s) you like to collect the messages from those ?

Well fetchmail is a pretty big disadvantage in itself...

With TB I have (already set up, which is probably the key factor) a GUI for configuring the mail collection from several accounts, the distribution of that mail into several folders, a half (quarter?) decent spam filter processing that mail, etc. And I have a means for viewing it.

Alternatively, I can move all that to a combination of Fetchmail and other components, and have TB read it via IMAP, all so that I end up where I am now, but with the opportunity to access the mail via IMAP from elsewhere. That is a perfectly reasonable, sensible, and suitable solution, it's just not convenient given that TB is already in and working doing all those jobs, where it would be better if I could hook into the existing system instead (the more I think about it, the more I think having TB natively support Maildir would be the way to go, rather than have it expose a web or IMAP interface).

If TB didn't have the add-on capabilities of FF I wouldn't have even considered it, but given that it does it's quite feasible that I'm not the only person to have thought about this, and someone else might have done something about it.

Evolution does natively handle Maildir, although last time I tried it I found that the account creation wizard for maildir was a bit broken, and I was also getting instances of Evolution bugging out on me. This was many versions ago though so things may have improved. Although I would still have to say that having two clients accessing the same maildir sounds a bit fishy to me compared to doing it with IMAP. Was there a particular reason you wanted to do the mail collection bit from TB ?

Reasoning: mostly that its there and works, with all the mail rules and spam filtering in place. Of-course a mixture of (eg) SpamAssassin, procmail, fetchmail, etc could achieve the same thing.

Regarding multiple programs accessing Maildir: as far as I know it *should* work, that being a major reason behind its existance. Given that mail arrives, gets moved around and/or deleted, but once it's arrived it doesn't get edited, it should be safe for multiple applications to read it, albeit that the user might get confused if using more than one mail client simultaneously (which is unlikely).

There are other good reasons for supporting Maildir instead of mbox; incremental mail back up, for example, is much easier when it's clear where the increments are (with mbox you pretty much backup the whole mail spool each time).