thanks everyone for the help :-)On Tue, 2011-05-10 at 11:56 +0200, mayak-cq wrote: > On Tue, 2011-05-10 at 09:34 +0100, Andy Bennett wrote: > > > i have a rather peculiar case involving an offline user, who has no > > > possibility of internet given his location (satellite is too expensive). > > > there is power, and he has computer, and there is a "proxy" -- i.e. > > > someone who passes once a day in the late afternoon, and picks up a usb > > > key and takes it back into town to send contents as e-mails. > > > ideally, the proxy's computer would somehow sync with the usb disk, as > > > well as the user's. > > > has anyone dealt with something similar? > > > with my sincerest thanks > > How about moving a UUCP spool on the USB stick? ;-) > > You could use something like rsync on "incoming" and "outgoing" folder. > > Is it just for eMail? What format are the messages in? > the user is running windows, and has a preference for using lookout. i > suppose that i could ask that he run thunderbird instead -- lookout > uses a single file pst, so concurrency is really difficult unless the > pst file is not the main/default one. at least thunderbird uses file > based message store, but alas, windblows doesn't run rsync (iirc). > maybe a secondary pst is the solution ... user would have drag all the > contents from secondary pst to primary pst. whatta drag! rsync is useless for this use-case. The PST is just a single binary BLOB. I don't believe it would solve the issue for TB either; just swapping out file contents underneath applications leads to an entire host of issues [cache coherency, etc...]. You need to find an 'intelligent' solution; such as UUCP store-and-forward that 'understands' the message level unit-of-work.
regrettably, both the proxy and the user are technically weak, and are only windows fluent.
i'm going to take a look at some connectors (bynari and so forth) to see if i can "sync" the message store to the usb disk. if it works, it would be more simplistic and clean.
my thought about thunderbird and rsync may be possible as well -- thunderbird stores messages in files and would therefore be a candidate for rsync ...
will report back
thanks
m
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