This must be a solved problem, but I was wondering where I should start looking....

My main personal POP e-mail account gets hundreds of spam messages a day because the address was on USENET for ages. It's with a small ISP who doesn't do any spam filtering by default, so if I don't check and download the messages at least every few days, my inbox fills up. Thunderbird is pretty good at filtering the spam on my client machines.

He has an IMAP/WebMail option, but the interface is very clunky and limited and I don't use it much.

I have about 4 PCs here at home that all get e-mail from that account on occasion, sometimes they're running Kubuntu and sometimes Windows, as well as a machine at work on occasion. The spam filters are obviously different in each case because they haven't seen the exact same training mail.

What I would really like, I think, is a dedicated machine at home that logs into my ISP account, and filters the spam. (I wouldn't worry about checking my home account from work, at least until I decide to put a home machine on the Internet.) Then when I want to check my e-mail from another machine on my network, I magically direct Thunderbird (or some other POP client) to check that already downloaded mail.

Is there a better way to solve this problem than simply using Windows or Linux to "share" Thunderbird's InBox? I really don't want to do anything with Courier or Sendmail or ... - I only get a handful of "real" messages a day.

How do you folks handle the multiple-PCs-checking-a-single-POP-account problem (other than "Don't do that")? Does everyone just use GMail or HotMail and let Google or MS figure out how to handle issues like these?

Thanks for any pointers. I appreciate it.

Cheers,
Scott.

I like what I'm reading about "fdm", but I don't know if I'm missing something that would make it more difficult than I think to implement.

http://fdm.sourceforge.net/

fdm is a program to fetch mail and deliver it in various ways depending on a user-supplied ruleset. Mail may be fetched from stdin, IMAP or POP3 servers, or from local maildirs, and filtered based on whether it matches a regexp, its size or age, or the output of a shell command. It can be rewritten by an external process, dropped, left on the server or delivered into maildirs, mboxes, to a file or pipe, or any combination.

[...]

5.8 From maildirs and mboxes

Fetching from maildirs allows fdm to be used to filter mail on the local machine. This is covered more detail in the later section on archiving and searching.

[...]

Thunderbird apparently uses the "mbox" format.

The only thing keeping me from downloading it and trying it out is that it doesn't have a Win32 port, so I'll have to get Kubuntu running on the desktop I would use as the "server" for this. It also doesn't explicitly say that remote mbox files on the network can be processed, but I assume if that is a limitation, then something clever can be done with local copies.

Thanks again.

Cheers,
Scott.

It looks like all I need to do is have the clients point to the Profile on the machine that I download the mail to.

http://kb.mozillazin...g_profiles_-_mail

Multiple PCs

If each user has their own PC you could store the profile on a file share. Thunderbird supports both drive letters and UNC pathnames when specifying the location of a profile. The file server will lock access to the files as needed to prevent corruption when multiple users access the profile at the same time. However, due to the way Thunderbird works there are problems having multiple users access the same folder at the same time. It works best if all of the messages in that folder have already been read and each user just reads messages in that folder.

Most file sharing software only allows one user to have write access to a file at a time. Thunderbird uses a separate file to store the messages for each folder and another file to cache the folder listing information for that folder. This means every time somebody reads a new message, changes a label or replies to a message it will lock one or both of those files. This makes it awkward for multiple users to access the same folder at the same time. Thunderbird also writes to the prefs.js file whenever it exits, even if you didn't change any settings.

Some users appear not to have any problems sharing a profile on a file share, while others find it unusable. This appears to be due to differences in how they share the profile. Its best suited for multiple users who don't access the profile at the same time or a single user who uses multiple PCs.

It sounds easy enough, especially since I'll be the only user. We'll see if there are any gotchas....

Naturally, there are some Windows-isms that can cause problems when accessing the profile from Linux: http://web.archive.o...d/share_mail.html

I'll report back if/when I get this working.

Cheers,
Scott.