Finally, Gmail offers IMAP

Previously Google claimed that IMAP would be too difficult to implement given their unconventional e-mail organization scheme (all e-mails basically in one folder). Now, they've finally opened up IMAP servers which allows much greater control than POP 3 previously did. For instance, one should be able to now import old e-mails into Gmail so that now all your mail is searcheable from one place!

To Beep or not to Beep

Seems like Linux has done everything to prevent anyone from controlling the I/O devices under /dev, which includes you. I had a simple task, I wanted my "mail-notification" program to beep when I had mail. Under "When new mail arrives:", there was the command "play /path/to/some/sound.aiff" or something... I don't want any process interrupting my sound card because I'm running Fedora Linux, and I don't have JACK or another sound mixer which will mix sounds from multiple processes (maybe one day ALSA will work like this).

So anyway, I tried a million different commands...

echo -ne "\a"

which prints just a bell character, but it's interpretted by mail-notification (or nothing) and is lost--not sounded on the system beeper.

I tried a C program by Johnathan Nightingale, beep, which I had lying around, but it fails because the kernel doesn't like it touching the devices.

Finally, I thought "hmm, beep.c is just writing to /dev/console, why can't I?" and I tried

echo -ne "\a" > /dev/console

And it worked! It's not the same beep as Thunderbird/xterm/emacs, but it's fine with me!

Fedora Core 5 + IMAP Server + SquirrelMail

The next best thing, because sharing the Mozilla Thunderbird Storage folder is giving me problems when I change networks, is to have an IMAP server that Thunderbird can store/retrieve messages with.

The mail from the Internet accounts could be copied to the IMAP server using Thunderbird, even if a delivery system (POP/SMTP) is not in place (for mail to get there otherwise). I installed SquirrelMail and tested this capability with Thunderbird already. I closed down sendmail, installed and started postfix. I set up the Cyrus IMAP, which was the hardest part of the IMAP/SquirrelMail setup.

The tutorials I found to help do this on Fedora Core 5 are:

http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/imapd/install.html
http://nakedape.cc/info/Cyrus-IMAP-HOWTO/quickstart-fedora.html
http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_fedora_core_5

The last one shows how to set up SMTP, as does the one from Cyrus itself. I'm still trying to figure out if I can have my own SMTP and use my IP Address (or its alias) as a domain for sending mail to.

Even if I can't, I think that having the IMAP server in place, just for storing mail, would be a big help as the mail would be accessible from anywhere (even using SquirrelMail).

Using the Same Thunderbird Storage Folder on Windows and Linux

Today I finally solved the problem of having multiple e-mail clients and multiple storage folders. First I used an IMAP account I have access to in order to move all the old e-mail I have on multiple computers onto the Thunderbird "Local Folders" in Linux on my server. This is as easy as copying all the messages in one Inbox to the Inbox on the IMAP account, and then on the other computer moving the messages out of the Inbox on the IMAP account to the local Inbox account. It's not the fastest, but it's the most compatible as Thunderbird doesn't support much importing from other e-mail storage folders.

So once I had everything on the "Local Folders" account in Thunderbird on Linux, I changed the Local Message Storage directory on Windows (not on the Server) to the storage directory in my home folder on my Linux server via a drive-mapped Samba share:
Y:\.thunderbird\ayrxordj.default\Mail\Local Folders
This can be found by going to Tools->Account Settings->Local Folders. Click Browse. You'll have to have "Show Hidden Files" ON to locate your Local Folders path with the GUI. You also need to make sure that all your e-mail accounts you have are set up to store the mail in the "Local Folders" rather than an individual folder for that account.
After some testing with no networking on the Windows computer, if the client doesn't have accesss to the network drive, you just get nothing under "Local Folders". In other words, it doesn't crash or anything.

So what does this mean? If I download a message on my Windows Thunderbird client, it is exactly like downloading it on the Linux Thunderbird client. It is the same for the Linux client (vice-versa). It also means that now I can have "Delete message from POP after download" set to "Yes" on both clients and avoid downloading e-mail that I've already seen.

Issues I can imagine running into include having both clients open simultaneously and possible Operating System dissimilarities in the implementation of Thunderbird. Also, it took a long time to open the gigantic storage folder the first time over the network, but cleaning up the 2-3 thousand messages and perhaps "compacting" the folders should help. The other issue is, since I merged the two clients, there are several duplicate e-mails, but there is an extension to find & delete duplicate messages which has already solved this problem for me. I removed all the duplicates (leaving me with only roughly two thirds of the messages, because this merge was so large) and compacting the folders did solve the long-to-load problem.

Now I can load up Thunderbird on Windows or Linux using the same "Local Folders" storage directory. Finally, no more getting on different computers/clients to find different mail.

There are still issues with using this technique. If you have a laptop or are losing connectivity, Windows will let you know that "Delayed Writing" failed. Also, a solution like having IMAP storage would be much more network-friendly in terms of bandwidth. See my post on setting up Cyrus IMAPD