> I'm pretty sure that this is possible, but I don't currently know enough > about > email to know where to start. > > My main desktop computer runs Centos 6 and my preferred email client is > Sylpheed, which supports both POP and IMAP email, and my "internal > network" has > a static IP address, so getting access to the computer from the big scary > world > via my phone isn't a problem. > > I have six different email accounts that live on various servers. I have > Sylpheed set up to poll each account once every ten minutes using POP3 and > download all incoming mail. Upon receipt, I have a whole lot of filters > in > Sylpheed to sort the mail into various subdirectories of my Mail > directory. > For example, one of my directory structures under Mail is inbox/1/2, and > email may be sorted in Mail/inbox or Mail/inbox/1 or Mail/inbox/1/2, or > other > subdirectories outside of inbox like, for example, Mail/3. In short, I > have a dozen or so subdirectories that Sylpheed sorts mail into based on > various criteria like From or Subject. > > What I would like to do is somehow make this whole thing available on my > Android > phone (Samsung Galaxy 3). As it sits right now, if I am not sitting in > front > of my computer the only way I can check my email is to ssh into it and > look at the files in each of those subdirectories using a text utility > like > less; this is really inconvenient and I can't reply to emails that way > until I > get back in front of my computer. > > I'm thinking that I need to run some kind of a mailserver on my computer > that > can be accessed by both Sylpheed locally and by ??? on my Android device. > I get > the impression that if I wanted to hand all of my email over to gmail I > could > then have something like this working. I don't particularly want to do > that; I would rather have something running on my own machine to do it. > > I could use something else to poll for my email (fetchmail?). Sylpheed > does > have a configuration setting that I'm not currently using that says > "Enable > strict checking of summary caches -- enable this if the contents of the > folders > may be changed by other applications" so based on that I think it can > handle > having messages magically changed by a program on my Android device. > > What is the best way to approach this? My best idea so far is to set up > fetchmail (or something) to do the pop downloads of incoming mail, and > have > some kind of a local imap server running though which I access the actual > mail > via any email client that can work with an imap account. Then I can set > up > Sylpheed to access only one account, that being the one on my local > computer, > and run some imap-using mail client on the Android device for remote > access. > > Having never actually used an imap email account in this way, that leads > to a > couple of other questions. (The only thing I've ever done with imap is > set > up squirrelmail.) What about filtering the email into those directories? > Procmail? And what happens to sent email -- I assume that the SMTP part of > the > mail client wouldn't actually change -- I would still send outbound mail > directly through the mailserver where my email account exists, right? But > does > it (can it) also send a copy to the imap mail store so I can send email > from > Android and later on review what I sent with Sylpheed? > You could set up VNC on your desktop port forward to you desktop so you can use a VNC viewer on the S3, the just use you normal desktop, but from your phone. I do this, so I know it works.