dave- i travel a ton for work and i ran into this problem a long time ago. here's an overview of how i do it. when i'm on the road and i want this functionality i uncomment a recipe in procmail that will dup all INBOX messages (after they've been filtered for mailing list content and run through SA) to another mailbox which i get via fetchmail using IMAP. mailing lists are more problematic. since i use MailDir format on my mail server, i have procmail dup the lists that i'm interested in to mbox messages in another directory tree, i then rsync (via ssh) this tree from the road. this creates an out of sync condition when i get home which i have to address by using mutt's stellar date selection and tagging mechanisms. this typically takes just a couple of minutes to tag all messages within a date range and mark them as read for all of the lists i read. when last we saw our hero (Friday, Jul 12, 2002), Dave Sherohman was madly tapping out: > I'm going to be venturing out soon and spending some time in areas > where net access will be intermittent, at best, so I'm looking for > suggestions on how best to set things up on my laptop and mail > server. > > My preferred software for online mail is the combination of mutt and > exim. I figure that simply modifying the cron job that runs exim's > queue on the laptop to only do so when online should pretty well > handle outgoing mail. > > For incoming mail, adding fetchmail to the mix is the obvious > solution. However, my recollection of past experience with > fetchmail is that it only allows the options of deleting all mail > from the server as it is collected or never deleting mail from the > server. But what I want is something similar to various GUI MUA's > option to delete mail from the server once it has been deleted on > the client. > > Another wrench in the works is that the server is already breaking > my mail out into several mailboxes. Without duplicating all the > filtering on the laptop as it is retrieved, this does not fit in > well with the way that fetchmail operates. > > I suppose one (slightly oddball) option would be to use CVS to > synchronize /var/spool/mail and ~/Mail, but a) I don't really want > to maintain a version history of my mailboxes and b) yeah, it would > work, and probably be fairly efficient, but somehow it just seems > Wrong. > > Anyone have a better way of accomplishing what I want? > -- steve ulrich sulrich at botwerks.org PGP: 8D0B 0EE9 E700 A6CF ABA7 AE5F 4FD4 07C9 133B FAFC