Windows sharing, (synchronising?), of email

There has to be a freebie ....

I know about MS Exchange of course, but no way!

Currently using Thunderbird, (on Vista), and just got a new laptop with Win 7.

What I want to do is have my email sitting on one and be able to access it from the other and also synchronise the "Sent" messages. Or something that achieves the same effect.

I'm using POP3 at the moment to access incoming mail from the remote server, with it held there for 30 days or until (finally) deleted here.

Is there anything any good? A more advanced consideration is if we get a tablet of some sort, and for anything sent from there to get into the main "Sent" folder. But that's way in the future.

I would just use a web based email for this.
imap is possible but always seems badly implemented.
if the two email machines are used at the same time, or the files are large dropbox wont help either.

edit: you may be able to set up a mail client to always 'forward' sent messages to yourself

Edited by ggremlin (Thu 21-Jul-11 19:35:40)

I use IMAP for this scenario. Let's me access my mail, and keep it in sync, from 3 computers and one iPad.

POP3 only looks at the Inbox of the mailbox. Any sent msgs are just held locally on the sending client.

Only IMAP will access all folders of the mailbox, incl. Sent Items, and keep them in step by holding the masters on the server. The clients then just provide a reflection of the server.

IMAP or webmail are the easiest options

One of the many reasons I use webmail

http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/sync.asp

Have I missed something?
All my e-mails are kept on a network drive and that is the folder everything is kept in.
I use several machines in different places depending on what I'm doing and all mail is available on all machines in real time.
I do use Seamonkey, though, but I used to do the same thing with outlook.

I'm not sure that would work with different clients. Can you keep an iPad and a Windows 7 client synchronised that way? (A rhetorical question - I know the answer.)

D'oh!

That of course would work as well

Wouldn't know - I don't do Apple

This is a Windows forum after all

I wonder if DropBox would work?

Believe it or not, Nicola, some Windows users are Apple users too (and even Linux users). A shared database is fine if all accesses to it come from the same client (although concurrent access could cause real problems) but IMAP is, IMO, more versatile as it allows disparate clients to remain synchronized. It also has the advantage that it is more disaster proof as the data is stored on a server that is probably better managed than the average home setup.

But if the access is always to be from the same client running on different PCs, and there is no possibility of 2 clients trying to access the data at the same time, putting the mailbox files on a network share is a reasonable solution.