Thunderbird shared mail folders

From Osnow

1 Overview
2 HowTo
3 Links

Overview

Say you want to sometimes access your email from a Windows machine, and sometimes from a linux machine. I came to this slowly as I was testing the waters in linux. Linux could do just about everything I wanted, but I was getting frustrated at my inability to seamlessly communicate (email) back and forth in the manner to which I had become accustomed. So the cross OS mail store was born.

I had already switched (painful) from Calypso to Thunderbird back at version 0.8. At that time I put the entire Win32 profile on my server so I could use the laptop or desktop as I needed. Now instead of all Windows versions of Thunderbird, I wanted to run Thunderbird on linux and get to my years of old email.

Now the only thing we are really sharing is the mail folders. Other system resources like the address book are NOT the same across different OSes and therefore must be duplicated. Extensions are OS specific too. The mail folders store email in a RFC standard format so programs other then Thunderbird could most likely read these too.

Note that this is not mail access from two machines simultaneously. The first program to open a profile locks the profile - NOT the mail store. If you have Thunderbird open on your desktop in Windows, and then open it under linux, the two copies of Thunderbird will NOT see each other and can try to access the same mail files at the same time. IT is not designed or suggested to work as multu-user. If you lose data this way... well not my fault - AND - you were warned.

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