Warning this is a long post!! A few weeks back I posted a question to both of these news groups about my desire to use the same mail data base for netscape 6.2 in windows and linux thus keeping mail in sync in both OS's automatically. I have since been reasonably successful and I thought this process might be of interest to someone else. Actually, being a bit of a newbie I must say I am impressed with my self for succeeding. It was not as easy as it seems like it should be.
I got a couple of very good suggestions from my post that started me down this successful path. Unfortunatelybecause of the fact that my database was not then united I have since lost these particular posts :-(. This should not happen again. Now no matter which OS I am running when I get my mail the other OS will see it when I boot into it on the next occasion. So now the story ... In Win9x (XP and 2000 are different) Netscape stores the POP mail at: Windows\Applications Data\Mozilla\Profiles\<profile>\<code#.slt>\Mail In Linux (at least Mdk 8.1) this same mail database is stored at: /home/<user>/.mozilla/default/<code#.slt>/Mail Note that this "code#.slt" directory is a different number each time you install and of course different in Linux and Windows. Exactly what this code means I have no idea but it must have some significance because if I change it and try to redirect my netscape mail elsewhere with the folder setting under the server settings, it does not work. Of course this may just be because Netscape is too dumb to actually change when you tell it to. In either case you are sort of stuck with the respective paths and file names in both OS's. I think there is some evidence that this code# is actually some info for encrypting the user passwords. More on this latter perhaps if I can still type by then. :-) One suggestion I got was to use a symlink from the Fat (Windows) mail directory to the linux one. This might well work but I ran into problems with this approach. I think perhaps I overcame these same issues with my actual approach I used, so it might well be possible to do the symlink approach too. The command I actually used was the mount command. It turns out that with the command "mount --bind old_directory new_directory" linux essentially hangs the old sub directory somewhere else in the directory tree. Now that is was just what the doctor ordered. There are however a couple of small hurdles to get over so this will work every time you boot your linux box. The first issue is the space in the "Application Data" sub directory. Linux script commands don't like these spaces much. You have to put quotes "" around the windows path name. The second issue is that you must be root to call this mount command so you have to put the appropriate lines in one of the startup scripts. And this must be after you have mounted the windows partition for example at /mnt/C. Also don't forget to set the user id# and group id# of the windows partition so that you can write your mail as <user>. I wrote a bash script to do this mount command and call it from within the /ext/rc.local startup script. In this way it is called by root so the mount works and the directory link is made as soon as you are in linux. In a multi-user environment these mount commands would have to be part of the login procedure but i have not crossed that bridge yet. So far linux won't let me change the user, group and permissions after the boot mount of the windows partition. I would really like to figure this issue out. Also, don't forget to have the same mail account names in both operating systems. OK...Now this works for POP mail but it does not seem to work for IMAP_mail which is stored at the same paths but in a directory called ImapMail. When I use this same procedure for this directory I cannot log on for one OS or the other. This depends on which OS the password is set in first. This is why I think the "code#.slt" file may include encryption info. This is actually no big deal as Imap mail can stay in sync anyway use info from the server. I thin newsgroups can be handled this way too but I have not tried this because like Imap mail they can stay in sync to some extent though the messages that are read in each OS will show up differently. No big deal really but I will try to get this to work in the near future. Hope this helps someone. Kim
