Date: Sun, 05 Oct 1997 13:25:21 -0700 From: John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com> To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Seamless nomadic e-mail access Message-ID: <199710052025.NAA28117@austin.polstra.com> In-Reply-To: <199710040744.RAA00300@word.smith.net.au> References: <199710040744.RAA00300@word.smith.net.au>
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Thanks for all the good ideas, everybody. Here's where things stand at present. First of all, [vent on] due to the morons at Computer Discount Whorehouse, my laptop still has only 8 MB of RAM. I ordered an additional 32 MB with the machine on September 11, and they shipped me the wrong memory. (They had mislabeled the box.) So far they have not gotten their act together enough to put the correct memory in my hands, despite numerous phone calls and despite the fact that I paid extra for 2nd day air shipping with the original order. [vent off] The point being, with only 8 MB, any large X11 application is almost unusable. So my options are limited for my upcoming trip. I tried ml + IMAP, and it doesn't look too bad. I don't have Motif currently, but I was able to get a Linux binary running under FreeBSD's emulation. I can't really try it out properly because of the limited RAM, but my first impression is that it sure uses a lot of screen real estate. Also, certain updates via IMAP (such as deleting messages) don't seem to be recognized by exmh on the local machine. I don't know yet whether that's an IMAP limitation or an exmh limitation. I'm building xfmail now so that I can try that. I also played around some more with running exmh on the local machine and displaying via PPP on the laptop's X server. I was hoping that the new LBX (low-bandwidth X) proxy in XFree86-3.1.1 would make it tolerable. It didn't really seem to make any noticeable difference for this application. Also, it took exmh all of 3 minutes to find the first bug in lbxproxy, causing me to abandon that idea. A couple of people suggested _always_ reading mail on the laptop, thereby skirting the problem of switching back and forth between machines. That's an intriguing idea, but I'm still hoping to avoid the need for it. I haven't looked into any of the commercial IMAP clients yet. Overall, I'm pretty disappointed at the state of the art for this mode of operation. I had hoped the world would be further along by now. John -- John Polstra jdp@polstra.com John D. Polstra & Co., Inc. Seattle, Washington USA "Self-knowledge is always bad news." -- John Barth
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