[OT] offline mail user and syncing

[mayak-cq]

On Tue, 2011-05-10 at 06:28 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:

> 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.

thanks everyone for the help :-)

regrettably, both the proxy and the user are technically weak, and are
only windows fluent.

i'm going to take a look at some connectors (bynari and so forth) to see
if i can "sync" the message store to the usb disk. if it works, it would
be more simplistic and clean.

my thought about thunderbird and rsync may be possible as well --
thunderbird stores messages in files and would therefore be a candidate
for rsync ...

will report back

thanks

m

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