e-mail sync question

[chriswilson]

I am trying to find a solution to the following problem. I need to synchronize an imap account between a desktop mac and a macbook air.

The inbox is stored on our IMAP server however the sent mail and mail folders are all local mailboxes stored on his desktop computer. The reason being mail account is simply too large to accommodate on the server (~20-50Gb).

Would MobileMe e-mail sync enable the owner to sync all the local and remote folders between his desktop mac and his macbook air?

 

[swiftaw]

No, MobileMe does not sync Mail Messages.

 

[chriswilson]

MobileMe Website

Thank you for the fast reply, could I ask you do you know the sync does do. I got the impression that you could sync the e-mail accounts from the MobileMe website. Below is a snippet from the On Your Mac section.

Sync all your Mac computers.
If you have more than one Mac, you can use MobileMe to keep your email, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks in sync across all your Mac computers and even a PC. You can also sync Dashboard widget preferences, Dock items, many application and system preferences, and Mail notes across all of your computers running Mac OS X Leopard.

 

[swiftaw]

Yes, it will sync the account info, but not the actual messages.

 

[chriswilson]

Any suggestion

Thanks for clearing that up.

Any ideas how this could be done??

 

[steve knight]

I just setup imap on two windows computers running Thunderbird. I jsut dragged and dropped the messages that were in the regular inbox to the new ones. or drug the folder and made a new one on the imap folder and they were all copied onto the server. then when I got the other thunderbird account going they were all copied onto that machine. this should work with most email apps. any email you can put into a imap folder should go to the server.

 

[BroadcastDoc]

I just setup imap on two windows computers running Thunderbird. I jsut dragged and dropped the messages that were in the regular inbox to the new ones. or drug the folder and made a new one on the imap folder and they were all copied onto the server. then when I got the other thunderbird account going they were all copied onto that machine. this should work with most email apps. any email you can put into a imap folder should go to the server.

What he's saying though is that he can't store the messages on the server because he has more messages than allowed space. So it's not a matter of being able to creat and sync IMAP folders, it's a matter of wanting to create and sync offline folders.

The reason MobileMe refers to syncing mail is because it's IMAP based. Because of the nature of IMAP, it is always in sync. MobileMe also adds the ability to sync account information and rules with Mail.app so essentially everything about your IMAP account can be synced across multiple Macs. The only gotcha to that is that any mail that you wish to sync must be online, and MobileMe only syncs the account information and relies on the IMAP server to handle the actual messages.

 

[chriswilson]

Any More ideas?

Anyone have any ideas? Its a real toughie for me. The account in question has mail stretching back almost a decade and its all still in use.

 

[paulbeattie87]

To my knowledge no such solution exists.

You could upload the sent items to somewhere like Gmail and have mail connect to it for sent items.

Whatever you do, it's going to be messy.

MobileMe would take all of the e-mail 25+GB's, you'd have to upload it to MobileMe's servers first, you would also need to purchase extra storage. Google Apps can also do this, even a standard Gmail account can purchase extra storage.