From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: johnbent@lanl.gov (John Bent)
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2008 11:46:16 -0700
Subject: [sup-talk] Persistence between IMAP clients
In-Reply-To: <20080204151221.GA29477@manheim.library.drexel.edu>
References: <20080204151221.GA29477@manheim.library.drexel.edu>
Message-ID: <1202149761-sup-2303@tangerine.lanl.gov>

Excerpts from Gabriel Sean Farrell's message of Mon Feb 04 08:12:21 -0700 2008:
> Is there a way to persist the labels applied from an instance of sup
> IMAPing from one machine to another instance on another machine?  I
> check my mail from four different computers on a regular basis, and I
> haven't figured out, for example, how to delete emails when checking
> with one machine and see them as deleted (that is, *not* see them in my
> inbox) when checking with another.  
> 
This isn't really answering your question but ... the reason I use sup is
because I can then use multiple computers to check email but have a
persistent view (exactly like what you want).  However, the way I do this
is not by figuring out how to maintain consistent labeling state across
the multiple instances but rather by only actually running sup from one
machine.  I then can check email from multiple computers by always ssh'ing
to that machine.  That's why I like sup: it's console based and lends itself
perfectly to this approach.

Even though this probably wasn't the answer you were looking for, I fear it
might be the best one you get.  sup isn't designed to actually modify any of
your existing mail folders.  It only reads them and then maintains its own
external state.  So, for example, you can't configure sup to delete emails from
an IMAP server.  What you can do is configure an external program like
fetchmail to pull the emails (and delete them from the IMAP server) and put
them into a local mbox on your machine which sup can then read.  That might
work for you; however, you'll splinter your emails.  Emails which are read on
one machine won't appear on your other three.  What you want is for sup to just
read from the IMAP server and leave them there and then for the four multiple
instances of sup to share their state with each other.  But they have no
mechanism for doing so - they'd need some server somewhere to help them and
they'd also need a bunch of code to implement that functionality.  You could
try to get that functionality transparently by using a distributed file system
shared across the four machines in which you keep your .sup folder.  That
should work (unless maybe there is binary data kept in the .sup files and you
have endian incompatibility across the four machines).  You could try to
approximate the shared file system thing by using something like cvs or git,
but that would be a big silly hassle.  Unless anyone else thinks of something
better, I think the ssh approach is your best bet.

My only remaining limitation with the ssh scheme is that my primary machine is
my desktop so I am not able to slurp down a bunch of new emails onto my laptop
and work on them from the plane... (the answer of course is to make the laptop
be the primary machine but that doesn't work for a couple of other various
reasons).

John