Synching non-Mac Mail Accounts

On Apr 18, 2008, at 1:03 PM, Johann Beda wrote:

> One idea I had the other day is that maybe it would be nice if Mac
> OS X had a built-in personal IMAP server acting as the back-end to
> mail.app
> - thus once you set up the accounts in mail.app you could use ANY IMAP
> client to access the mail and maybe even expose that IMAP server to
> the
> network at large so you could access your email from anywhere. I
> suppose
> some of this functionality is intrinsic present with "back to my
> mac" type
> of features.

It's fairly straightforward to set up something like this yourself,
provided you're comfortable compiling and installing software. I've
done
just that on both my G5 and my Powerbook. courier-imap
builds and runs just fine on Leopard (I don't remember whether the
RANLIB="ranlib -c" trick is still necessary for a clean build). Setting
it up takes a bit of effort, and getting Leopard's built in postfix to
start up on boot and run in Maildir mode took some Google help, but
everything now works. I access mail with whatever client I want from
whatever
device I want. I just switched from Thunderbird to Apple Mail because
Thunderbird was crashing entirely too much recently, most often when
trying to reply to an email. Of course, since I'm using IMAP, the
transition
was painless.

Ordinarily my personal mail flow is fetchmail (using IMAP) from .Mac and
Earthlink -> postfix on the G5 and set clients to point
to my local IMAP server on the G5. (Work mail is kept separated on a
server at
work, and isn't stored locally at all.) When I'm traveling, I used to
switch
to using fetchmail on the Powerbook and its courier-imap server, and
then when
I got home I transferred whatever I wanted to keep to the G5. When
Back to my Mac
came along, I learned about the IPv6 addresses it uses, and now before
I leave
home I always check what the IPv6 address of the G5 is beforehand so I
can
access its server remotely without punching an IMAP hole through the
Airport
Express, and refile mail immediately. Now that I have an iPod Touch I
decided
that when I travel I'll just to leave the mail on .Mac while I'm away
and access
the IMAP server there. Unfortunately, the Touch doesn't seem to be
able to do IPv6,
so I can't file mail to my G5 from my Touch, but that's a minor
annoyance.

--
Paul Schinder
schinderpobox.com

Dan Frakes wrote:
> On 4/18/2008 10:03 AM, "David Ross" wrote:
>> Over the years I've discovered that some folks just don't like IMAP. It
>> doesn't seem to be a rational issue just one of I like my email on MY machine
>> and don't try and convince me otherwise.
>
> For me, at least, it's been a very rational issue: over the years, I've
> tried to switch to IMAP several times, and regardless of the email client I
> tried (with several IMAP servers), it was never reliable enough.
>
> The last time I tried was a couple years ago. I've been told by people I
> trust that Mail and Entourage have both improved greatly in this respect, so
> it's probably time to try again.

Everyone should understand. Trying to use IMAP with either Mail.app or Eudora is like trying to haul plywood in your sedan. Yes you can do it but it's not a valid test of the car or your ability to visit the lumber yard and bring home plywood. Both of those clients have long histories of IMAP issues.

David

If you really want to test IMAP you should sign up for a few mailing lists. Apple's OS X Server list is a high volume site. Also Tidbits. This way you'll get a steady stream of emails while in it and also bursts when you log in.

http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo

Pick a few high traffic ones and let it roll for a while.

David

On Apr 19, 2008, at 09:12, Paul Schinder wrote:

>
> On Apr 18, 2008, at 1:03 PM, Johann Beda wrote:
>
>> One idea I had the other day is that maybe it would be nice if Mac
>> OS X had a built-in personal IMAP server acting as the back-end to
>> mail.app
>> - thus once you set up the accounts in mail.app you could use ANY
>> IMAP
>> client to access the mail and maybe even expose that IMAP server to
>> the
>> network at large so you could access your email from anywhere. I
>> suppose
>> some of this functionality is intrinsic present with "back to my
>> mac" type
>> of features.
>
> It's fairly straightforward to set up something like this yourself,
> provided you're comfortable compiling and installing software.

As another option . . . MailServe from http://cutedgesystems.com/software/MailServeForLeopard/
  . . . this is a $15 package which (while it doesn't do anything you
can't figure out how to do your self from the command line) gives you
a "totally buzzword compliant mail server on MacOS X".

As long as your ISP doesn't block the ports used for incoming or
outgoing mail you can get your domain and run it out of your house. If
you still need to use the ISP's outgoing mail server that's an option.

I haven't used the Leopard version; but the Tiger version worked
fine . . . but you'll probably also have to setup DNS with his DNS
Enabler if you want to use SSL. It will generate a test cert (which
will still work fine and provide encrypted connections) but under
Tiger I had trouble getting SSL connections to work correctly.

The support has gone downhill a bit since then . . .which is the
primary reason I didn't set it up on Leopard yet.

At 12:43 AM -0700 4/18/08, Edward Reid wrote:
>At 10:13 04/17/08 -0700, Chris Devers wrote:
>>On the plus side, [fastmail.fm is] a free, fast, fairly reliable IMAP
>>account. On the down side, the service is looking a little dated by now,
>>offering only a 10mb quota and 40mb/month of bandwidth;
>
>OTOH, Fastmail makes their money entirely from their customers

snip

>I like using an email provider which focuses on customers instead of on
>advertisers. To make it very clear: that multi-GB of storage which Gmail
>"gives" you isn't free, it's paid for by advertising, and this means you
>pay for it in the time you spend viewing the ads. You may not think you
>spend much time looking at the ads, but Google's bottom line says you spend
>enough time to make it worthwhile for the advertisers to spend oodles of
>dollars placing ads there.

Well, if you just use gmail for POP and/or IMAP, you never even see
the ads, so they cost you absolutely nothing. They only appear with
the webclient.

(I used fastmail for years, and they were OK. But they weren't more
reliable than gmail -- less actually -- and far more expensive, and I
prefer the gmail web client for the very rare occasion that I need to
use a web client.)
--
=Alex Hoffman

Have now set up a number of Yahoo groups and Tidbits for Gmail IMAP,
and got some helpful test messages from some of you. Thank you. One
thing I've noted already is Gmail seems to have no trouble relaying
from this private server located 100 miles from my home server,
cox.net. Is there anything magic about Gmail IMAP, or is that just a
coincidence? I suspect I'll likely need to continue using
dyndns.com, and if so hopefully it will work for Gmail IMAP.

Dave

On 17-Apr-2008, at 11:13, Marshall Clow wrote:
> At 12:29 PM -0700 4/15/08, Chris Devers wrote:
>> I continue to be baffled that anyone
>> puts up with POP mail, when all these ad hoc workarounds like
>> remembering to leave things on the server tend to be nonissues for
>> IMAP.)
>
> I use POP for several reasons:
> * I like having access to all my email all the time, even if I don't
> have a network connection.

Not unique to POP3

> * Searching email is quick and easy - networks are way slower than
> disks.

This is why Mail.app keeps local copies, and its searching is very fast.

> * It's easy to back up my email if it is all "physically" on my
> laptop.

See above.

> * It's a privacy thing; my mail only exists in one place, once I've
> popped it off the server. No bored sysadmins snooping through several
> years worth of my mail ;-) [ And yes, people do email
> username/password pairs.... ]

If sysadmins are snooping through your email you need to find another
host.

On 18-Apr-2008, at 01:43, Marshall Clow wrote:
> I believe that any bored sysadmin can read my mail sitting in
> the mail spool before I pop it off. That's anywhere from a few
> minutes to a few hours worth of mail. I don't "leave mail on server"
> with POP.

This doesn't prevent someone reading them. Most servers write backups
ALL THE TIME. Going back to the incremental to read you mail is just
as easy as reading the mail in the first place. Even on my server I
run an incremental backup every hour, but on a large system, every
write is duplicated to backups and every write is recoverable.

> If I was using IMAP (and not deleting anything, as is my
> habit), then there could be several years worth of mail sitting on a
> server.

Again, if you have an issue with sysadmins reading your email you need
a new host. If this is just generic and unwarranted paranoia then you
probably should host your own email. 'Security" is in no way a reason
to choose POP3 over IMAP. There is, actually, NO reason to choose
POP3 over IMAP.

You seem to think that IMAP mail 'only' exists on the server, and this
is not true. The server is the 'master' and the clients are the
'slaves' so changes on the server are reflected on all clients
automatically. This does not prevent you backing up your mail
locally, searching it locally, or anything else you can do with POP3.
IMAP simply gives you more options on how to view your mail,
not less. It is a superset of POP3 in terms of abilities.

> I also believe that a sysadmin could set up a script to copy
> off all my mail as it arrives, too - but that's outside the scope of
> "bored sysadmin snooping around".


Actually, a lot of mail systems do this automatically (with all files)
to create 'perfect' backups.

On Apr 18, 2008, at 1:03 PM, Johann Beda wrote:

> One idea I had the other day is that maybe it would be nice if Mac
> OS X had a built-in personal IMAP server acting as the back-end to
> mail.app
> - thus once you set up the accounts in mail.app you could use ANY IMAP
> client to access the mail and maybe even expose that IMAP server to
> the
> network at large so you could access your email from anywhere. I
> suppose
> some of this functionality is intrinsic present with "back to my
> mac" type
> of features.


I starting doing something just like this back when OSX was .2 or .3,
mostly because I wanted to have a central archive of all my email, and
be able to access my it from various machines (office, home, laptop),
and not have to worry about synching, and other head aches. The IMAP
server I set up didn't get any direct incoming mail, it just acted as
a place for me to consolidate all my email from various email
accounts, and give me access to it from any machine. It was also
useful in that it got me around the total storage and per email file
size limitation that the ISP was imposing. (And being able to try
different mail clients with little or no hassle was a minor plus.)

As Paul Schinder noted in his response, to do this the cheap (free)
way, you do have to be comfortable mucking around in the terminal to
get things properly set up. But projects like fink (and their GUI
front-end finkcommander) make the compile and install more or less a
straight forward process. For the setup, there are numerous web
tutorials outlining the process for setting up Postfix, uw-imap (or
some other imap server), and fetchmail. (e.g. http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Workbench/eart.index.html)

Alternatively, you could just run OSX Server. In particular Leopard
server includes a new "Server Preferences" that makes setting up mail
services trivial (though some would say that this approach is just
asking for trouble). You could also use Server Admin, which is
significantly more complex (but gives you much greater control). But
even Server Admin is still a lot more straight forward than mucking
around in the terminal.

Admittedly, running OSX Server just to have an IMAP "back end" to the
mail-app is overkill, and it will cost you to the tune of $499. But
if you have some need (or desire) to run your own mail server, it's
certainly the most user-friendly option.

Tn

On SundayApr 20, 2008, at 5:59 AM, David Ross wrote:
> Everyone should understand. Trying to use IMAP with either Mail.app
> or Eudora is like trying to haul plywood in your sedan. Yes you can
> do it but it's not a valid test of the car or your ability to visit
> the lumber yard and bring home plywood. Both of those clients have
> long histories of IMAP issues.

Made the switch to Gmail IMAP; so far haven't had any issues that I
know about, and I don't really understand the analogy about hauling
plywood. Rules/filters in place in Mail.app have continued to work
for gmail.com IMAP without any further fiddling around, so some of
the more active lists I'm receiving are going to their individual
folders. On the iPhone, some but not all Tidbits messages are being
received but with an error that they cannot be displayed due to their
formatting. Have no idea what that's all about. Can anyone enlighten me?

The one item I had to do "manually" was unsub from Tidbits under
the .mac address. The next big test will be switching my business
webhosting account to Godaddy.com. For non-technical guys like me,
it seems to do a good job and the price is right.

Dave Clark

"David Ross" <drdavidrossconsultant.com> wrote:
>Dan Frakes wrote:
>> The last time I tried was a couple years ago. I've been told by people I
>> trust that Mail and Entourage have both improved greatly in this respect, so
>> it's probably time to try again.
>
> Everyone should understand. Trying to use IMAP with either Mail.app or
> Eudora is like trying to haul plywood in your sedan. Yes you can do it but
> it's not a valid test of the car or your ability to visit the lumber yard and bring
> home plywood. Both of those clients have long histories of IMAP issues.

True, although I said/wrote Entourage, not Eudora ;-)

It seems that when I read an IMAP message on the laptop, that prevents the same msg being downloaded to my iPhone. Is that the way IMAP works?

Dave Clark

On Sun, 20 Apr 2008, Tomoharu Nishino wrote:

> Admittedly, running OSX Server just to have an IMAP "back end" to the
> mail-app is overkill, and it will cost you to the tune of $499. But
> if you have some need (or desire) to run your own mail server, it's
> certainly the most user-friendly option.

Well, except that not all software for the standard version of OSX will
run on OSX server.

For just one example, I seem to remember that one or more of the iLife
applications refuses to run on OSX Server.

(Note: I can't find this constraint on Apple's requirements pages for
iLife '05, '06 or '08, so maybe I'm remembering something that doesn't
apply any more, but I do see at least some independent articles talking
about it, e.g. http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/25/098249 ).

So if you go down that route, you're may be dedicating the machine to
being a server and not much more. The client version ships with most of
what you need to run a simple home server; the server version mainly
bundles it all up behind a simpler GUI for getting it running.


--
Chris Devers

On Apr 21, 2008, at 6:44 AM, Clark David wrote:

> On the iPhone, some but not all Tidbits messages are being
> received but with an error that they cannot be displayed due to their
> formatting. Have no idea what that's all about. Can anyone enlighten
> me?

That's interesting, I had the same trouble with my new iPod Touch and
wrote it off as Mail being intended for a device that has a continuous
connection to the Internet. I was using the Touch out of range of
WiFi. It was strange, because the MIME type it was constantly
complaining about being unable to display was text/plain, which you
would think would be no problem provided it downloaded the text along
with the headers when it was connected. Some plain text messages,
mostly from European senders, were being displayed correctly, though.

In general with the Touch, it'd be nice if Apple fixed up the software
so that it worked a little better out of range of the network. I'm
also not fond of the arbitrary 200 message limit in Mail; although you
can get more by scrolling down to the bottom and asking for more, it
seems to discard all but 200 messages between invocations of Mail.
Still, it's a lot better at email than my Palm.

--
Paul Schinder
schinderpobox.com

On Apr 21, 2008, at 3:44 AM, dc19991 wrote:

> It seems that when I read an IMAP message on the laptop, that
> prevents the same msg being downloaded to my iPhone. Is that the way
> IMAP works?

That doesn't happen here (using .mac server and a Courier server). I
haven't messed with GMail IMAP (I read my GMail account just often
enough to keep them from deleting it (so far)).

If you move a message into an IMAP folder you haven't told iPhone
about, that might be the cause.

   --John

At 3:44 AM -0700 4/21/08, dc19991 wrote:
>It seems that when I read an IMAP message on the laptop, that
>prevents the same msg being downloaded to my iPhone. Is that the way
>IMAP works?

This is where gmail is a little weird. It's not IMAP, but rather
gmail generally.

You can either:

1) Keep the current behavior, where email is only downloaded once,
even if you have multiple clients.

2) Have it download everything on every client, including all you
sent mail (as though you bcc'd yourself on each message). To do this,
change you user id from "dc1999gmail.com" to
"recent:dc1999gmail.com".

Unfortunately, there's not middle ground, or least there wasn't the
last time I checked.


--
=Alex Hoffman
Leadership, Policy & Politics
Teachers College, Columbia University

On Apr 21, 2008, at 6:44 AM, Clark David wrote:
>On the iPhone, some but not all Tidbits messages are being
>received but with an error that they cannot be displayed due to their
>formatting. Have no idea what that's all about. Can anyone enlighten
>me?

I get this error when I don't have network or EDGE access (i.e. on
the subway). That is, I get this message for some messages that have
not been fully downloaded. However, I can look at the exact same
messages later, when I DO have access.

I'm fascinated by Paul's mentioning that he also gets the same
message on his touch. Paul, does this happen when you have WiFi
access, or only when trying to read (presumably) previously
downloaded messages?


--
=Alex Hoffman
Leadership, Policy & Politics
Teachers College, Columbia University

>> On the iPhone, some but not all Tidbits messages are being
>> received but with an error that they cannot be displayed due to their
>> formatting. Have no idea what that's all about. Can anyone enlighten
>> me?
>
> I get this error when I don't have network or EDGE access (i.e. on
> the subway). That is, I get this message for some messages that have
> not been fully downloaded. However, I can look at the exact same
> messages later, when I DO have access.
>
> I'm fascinated by Paul's mentioning that he also gets the same
> message on his touch. Paul, does this happen when you have WiFi
> access, or only when trying to read (presumably) previously
> downloaded messages?

No, I was out of range of WiFi at the time. I was curious to see if I
could use the Touch the same way that I used to use my Palm, to read
mail during moments when I'm away from any network. I was expecting
it either to work or not work. Since Mail on the Touch has no
preference to download mail for offline viewing like Mail on
{desk,lap}tops, I was mostly expecting it not to work at all, since
the software was written for iPhone and its near continuous connection
to the network. Instead, I got this curious half working/half not
where it complained a lot about text/plain and occasionally about text/
html, but some plain text messages showed perfectly. Even some html
mail showed well enough to read, although without embedded images.

--
Paul Schinder
schinderpobox.com

At 6:34 AM -0700 4/22/08, Paul Schinder wrote:
>>>On the iPhone, some but not all Tidbits messages are being
>>>received but with an error that they cannot be displayed due to their
>>>formatting. Have no idea what that's all about. Can anyone enlighten
>>>me?
>>
>>I get this error when I don't have network or EDGE access (i.e. on
>>the subway). Paul, does this happen when you have WiFi
>>access, or only when trying to read (presumably) previously
>>downloaded messages?
>
>No, I was out of range of WiFi at the time.

That makes sense, to me.

I believe that the text of the error message is, in fact, in error.
The problem is not the formatting of the message, rather that it was
not fully downloaded. I believe that you can check that same message
later, once you are connected, and will be able to read it.

Has anyone else seen this error, or have an alternative explanation?


--
=Alex Hoffman
Leadership, Policy & Politics
Teachers College, Columbia University

On Apr 23, 2008, at 1:06 PM, Alexander Hoffman wrote:

> At 6:34 AM -0700 4/22/08, Paul Schinder wrote:
>>>> On the iPhone, some but not all Tidbits messages are being
>>>> received but with an error that they cannot be displayed due to
>>>> their
>>>> formatting. Have no idea what that's all about. Can anyone
>>>> enlighten
>>>> me?
>>>
>>> I get this error when I don't have network or EDGE access (i.e. on
>>> the subway). Paul, does this happen when you have WiFi
>>> access, or only when trying to read (presumably) previously
>>> downloaded messages?
>>
>> No, I was out of range of WiFi at the time.
>
> That makes sense, to me.
>
> I believe that the text of the error message is, in fact, in error.
> The problem is not the formatting of the message, rather that it was
> not fully downloaded. I believe that you can check that same message
> later, once you are connected, and will be able to read it.

Yes, I think that's right. I've certainly never seen the message when
connected to a network, and it's likely that I read some of those same
messages later on the Touch, although I can't be sure.

Mail on the Touch really needs a "download all messages for local
viewing" option. Just another indication to me that Apple really
doesn't want to get back into the PDA market.

Paul Schinder
schinderpobox.com