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Who or what do you want to share with?

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Just the other computers on my home LAN. I have three computers, a laptop and two desktops. The laptop is set up to receive mail to my mail accounts. One of the desktops is setup to receive mail on my wifes accounts. The remaining desktop is not setup for mail at all.

Sometime when working on this third box I need some information received in an email on my laptop, which is usually in a different part of the house. I just wondered if the was a simple way to view the folders in OE.

Ah, right, I understand that problem. I get that between my desktop at work and my shiny new works laptop. The email or document you want is always on the other machine. Practically, I can rely on works' server and use pop3 in "leave a copy on the server" mode.

Focusing on email, leaving stuff on a server, or using IMAP, does assume that the server provides enough storage to hold all the email you may want to refer back to. Most ISPs' email provision is not so big that you could store email indefinitely. Nor will many of them guarantee to preserve your emails.

The really nice way to do it would be to share, locally, the .dbx folders that OE uses, though I'm not sure what happens if two separate instances of OE tried to access the same file at the same time. You could try using Windows' sharing to expose the folders containing these files to the other machines on your LAN.

A 3rd possibility is googlemail, which can do pop3 access and forwarding, and they offer 2 GB of storage space, so you'd have a job filling it up. Again I'd be cautious about the possibility of them losing your email - it's free, so no guarantees.

I do like the suggestion of running your own IMAP (or why not pop3?) server that someone else has suggested. Doing that would be easy for linux, but I'm not sure what is available for windows users. Squillions of hits on google, you may be spoilt for choice.

Edited by Xris (Thu 19-Jul-07 18:28:30)

One more thought: VNC. Remote desktop access. You can operate a networked computer remotely, so you could run OE on the laptop from your desktop. Copying the data via most VNC systems is a bit of a fag, but you could always re-post it to yourself.

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I do like the suggestion of running your own IMAP (or why not pop3?)....

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With IMAP you can see from whatever machine you are on if the mail has been read or answered or flagged important etc.
Cheers
Jon