Thanks.
Susan


#!/bin/sh
# resolve all conflicts in favor of the work computer, to insure it doesn't get messed up!
unison -prefer="ssh://mark@me.myhost.com//home/mark/" -batch -ui=text thunderbird


###

In that script “thunderbird” is the name of my unison profile. The “prefer” options means it never asks me questions and the “ui=text” makes it run noticeably faster than launching a GUI.

A simple modification could be made to the script so that it launched Thunderbird after the sync:


unison -prefer="ssh://mark@me.myhost.com//home/mark/" \
-batch -ui=text thunderbird && mozilla-thunderbird


Admittedly, that doesn’t address the shutdown-and-then-sync case at the airport, but if you are using IMAP, the critical part– the mail– would already be sync unless you were working offline, which adds it’s own complication in any case.

I suppose I probably lose minor preference changes sometimes because I forget to sync once, and then later the difference is always resolved in favor of the work computer. In practice, this has just never been a problem. IMAP handles keeping the critical e-mail data in sync.

I use thunderbird, but I read email from multiple computers (work, home, and several laptops). I can set up thunderbird and imap so that, as Mark mentions above, it is possible to have all of my mail syncronized, but it does not syncronize any of the address book, RSS feed information, preferences, extensions, and (most importantly), the learned spam filter settings. Basically, I need a solution like ‘unison’, but I don’t want to have to deal with manually synchronizing each time I end a session (if I’m at an airport and need to quickly shutdown, which happens often for example).

Has anyone found a solution for this? I’ve found a number of potentially relevant links and I’d be interested to find out if anyone has tried them. These include:

1) http://kb.mozillazine.org/Synchronizing_mail_on_two_computers_%28Thunderbird%29
mentions a link that mentions ‘FolderShare’, a program to automatically syncronize
folders over the network. It sounds like it does what ‘unison’ does, but it
doesn’t require manual synchronization.

Has anyone tried FolderShare for thunderbird? How well does it work?

2) http://wiki.mozilla.org/Talk:Thunderbird:2.0_Product_Planning
It is acked by the mozilla thunderbird team, but I’m not sure if it will make it into 2.0
(it doesn’t say).

thanks!

Well you certainly hit the nail on the head. The mail “server” that comes with OS X does not support shared folders. At all. No wonder I’ve been pulling my hair out. As I mentioned earlier I simply activated the native IMAP server functions using Cutedge Systems excellent MailServe program. I’ve emailed them for support but I imagine I’ll need to upgrade the entire OS to OS X Server in order to properly implement our requirements.

Thank you kindly for your expert help and advice! It is greatly appreciated.

Brian

Thanks very much for the link. I’ll pursue that avenue next week. A few high(er) priority items came up the past couple of days. However, to support your theory, I noticed this message (occurring frequently) in the log:

imapd[9999] Killed (lost mailbox lock) user=xxx host=xxx

This may well point to a sharing problem!

I changed the “Connection Cache” value from 5 to 1 so that the user could click another folder and thereby force an update to the server. This has once again only worked “so-so”.

I’ll submit another comment once I pursue the shared folders idea.

Till then …

Brian

It also struck me that a formal request tracking system might be a good solution the department we work with. It’s what we use for our small team here:
http://www.bestpractical.com/rt

It some ways, it works like a glorified shared e-mail system here. However, it allows to you add custom fields that e-mail doesn’t have, like classifying each request with a type such as “Sales Inquiry” or “Product Return”.

E-mail is still a central part of the application. Requests can come in that way, and reps can respond by e-mail.

Mark

It does look like Mac OS X uses Cyrus. And it also looks like there are recommended special steps to implement “shared folders” with it. That documentation is here:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mimap/chapter/ch09.html#91630

This continues to seem like a worthwhile avenue to pursue.

Mark