[OT] offline mail user and syncing

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Tue, 2011-05-10 at 11:56 +0200, mayak-cq wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-05-10 at 09:34 +0100, Andy Bennett wrote: 
> > > i have a rather peculiar case involving an offline user, who has no
> > > possibility of internet given his location (satellite is too expensive).
> > > there is power, and he has computer, and there is a "proxy" -- i.e.
> > > someone who passes once a day in the late afternoon, and picks up a usb
> > > key and takes it back into town to send contents as e-mails.
> > > ideally, the proxy's computer would somehow sync with the usb disk, as
> > > well as the user's.
> > > has anyone dealt with something similar?
> > > with my sincerest thanks
> > How about moving a UUCP spool on the USB stick? ;-)
> > You could use something like rsync on "incoming" and "outgoing" folder.
> > Is it just for eMail? What format are the messages in?
> the user is running windows, and has a preference for using lookout. i
> suppose that i could ask that he run thunderbird instead -- lookout
> uses a single file pst, so concurrency is really difficult unless the
> pst file is not the main/default one. at least thunderbird uses file
> based message store, but alas, windblows doesn't run rsync (iirc).
> maybe a secondary pst is the solution ... user would have drag all the
> contents from secondary pst to primary pst. whatta drag!

rsync is useless for this use-case.  The PST is just a single binary
BLOB.  I don't believe it would solve the issue for TB either; just
swapping out file contents underneath applications leads to an entire
host of issues [cache coherency, etc...].

You need to find an 'intelligent' solution; such as UUCP
store-and-forward that 'understands' the message level unit-of-work.