mobile-SMTP

Spam is not only a problem for its recipients, the measures to fight spam also hinder a lot of legitimate emailing, e.g.

• sending email (with SMTP) from your own computer
• and posting to mailing lists from a different email-address than the one you are subscribed to the list with.

While I do have a SMTP server (exim) installed on my laptop, some networks just do not let me use it to send over port 25 (except to their own SMTP server, that is, but some of those SMTP servers (e.g. at work and gmail) restrict the sender address.

One way of managing this would be to always establish a virtual private tunnel to a network where you have the possibility to send using the sender address that suits your need at the moment (e.g. with vtun).

That requires that you have access to a VPN-server running 24/7 (or at least whenever you might want to send an email) in such a network.

If you go that route, then you only have to make it easy to switch on and of the VPN, when you are about to send email.

Managing email

Restrictions:

1. Low bandwith at home, mail must be downloaded prior to me reading it
2. Low disk-space, but high bandwidth in laptop, this one must be able to read mail directly from an imap-server with high bandwidth.
3. Mail must be sorted in folders, and when deleted once, must be deleted from every server/maildir I use.

Reciveing, Reading, Deleting, moving (syncronising)

                                  Laptop (when home)
                                    |
                                   IMAP
                                    |
      gmail <- offlineimap -> dovecot at home
       /                         /      \
     IMAP               offlineimap   offlineimap
     /                         /          \
Laptop (not home)  computer at work    stationary computer at home

Or just

                         Laptop (will be slower when at home)
                            |
                           IMAP
                            |
                          gmail
                         /      \
               offlineimap   offlineimap
                      /          \
         computer at work    stationary computer at home

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Last modified: 2007-12-01