* On 28 Jul 2012, Daryl Lee wrote: > For a variety of reasons, none of which are germane to this topic, > I have arranged for my primary work computer (a Macbook Pro) to > triple-boot into Mac OS X (Lion), Windows 7, and Linux (Ubuntu 12.04). > I want to be able to both read new mail and all my archived email from > any of those OSes, since I need to communicate whatever environment I > happen to be working in at the moment. I tried to make Thunderbird > do that, since it seems to allow for such behavior, but there were > constant issues with file permissions and data reliability. It > occurred to me recently that Mutt might be the answer. So here are > the questions I can think of: > > 1. I don't expect this to be easy--but is there some reason it's just > plain impossible?
Seems possible to me. Obviously, unless you use IMAP exclusively, you need a filestore that is shared among all three OSes, and the only common r/w filesystem I know of for those three OSes is FAT32. You may find problems with mail storage on FAT32, especially if using Maildir. You may need to use UNIXv7 (mbox) instead to get around filesystem limitations. There's another approach you could take that might seem totally nuts, but would avoid a lot of issues: put a stripped-down Linux VM on a shared FAT32 filesystem, use that VM for mutt (or whatever), and launch it from whatever OS you're running. > 2. Is it possible to write a single .muttrc that I can copy to > the three home directories that can determine the "folder" path > based on the current OS? That is, the common mail folder is called > "/Volumes/Common/Mail" in OS X, "D:/Common/Mail" in Windows, and > "/Common/Mail" in Linux. Or do I just have to have three separate > .muttrc files and manually coordinate them? (I've never actually used > the Windows version of Mutt, so I'm guessing at the path format.) Sure. I've never used win32 mutt either, but presumably you can use it as part of a full mingw32/cygwin environment to get scripting tools. Behold this command: source "~/bin/muttrc.sh |" That runs ~/bin/muttrc.sh, and interprets its output as muttrc commands. You can write a muttrc that emits your standard configuration, then runs that "source" command at the end to fill it out with variations based on current OS. -- David Champion • d...@uchicago.edu • IT Services • University of Chicago
