Sharing Mail across two Macs

H

HK Guy

Registered
I want to access the same mailboxes from two different Macs so when I'm home I can still work on my iMac with the mail I received and sent on my Powerbook in the office or elsewhere, and vice versa. So I need to use the local Mail directory on the Powerbook as the master, and to connect to it from the iMac.

Tiger Mail will not work with an alias to the Library/Mail folder on another Mac – says the files are 'not writeable' (even when Mail.app is not running on the Powerbook), nor can I edit the Account Directory field in Accounts:Advanced, which is constantly grayed out.

Both Macs are on 10.4.3 and connected using Bonjour. Help!
 
Your best solution to this is an IMAP rather than POP account. IMAP was created specifically to solve your situation. With an IMAP account the mail is all retained on the server and accessed through the email client on the local machine. That way you can access the same mail from any number of different computers and have exactly the same mail. The default .Mac account is IMAP, but it can also be used as POP. The downsides to IMAP are: you have to be connected to the internet to read any of your mail; if you keep lots of old messages you may run out of disk space on the server and have to buy/rent more; and not all providers support IMAP.

I have seen a lot of attempts to do what you are attempting using a POP account and none of them have been particularly satisfactory and often they have resulted in a disasterous loss of data at some point along the way.
 
I concur with perfessor101 -- a POP account is not intended to be used this way... an IMAP account is intended to be used this way. The easiest thing to do is use an IMAP account, but you can also try this:

In Mail's "Account" preferences, under the "Advanced" tab, try enabling "Remove a copy from server after retrieving a message:" and set it to "When moved from Inbox." Now, you can download the messages to either computer, and the message will be removed from the server and no longer downloadable when you remove the downloaded copy from any of your Inboxes.
 
And if you have a dot Mac account you can sync the two computers (the Sync function of OS X).
 
Thanks for the feedback. However, I don't think that what I'm trying to do should be that difficult or dangerous, since I don't want to access the same POP account simultaneously from the two Macs, only for Mac 'A' to be the master holding the mailbox files and for Mac 'B' to run Mail.app but to access the mailbox files held on Mac 'A'.

Question: what is the point of the 'Account Directory' field on the Accounts:Advanced tab of Mail Preferences? Is it always grayed out?

P.S. Doing this is easy in Outlook for Windows; just tell it where the mailbox ffile is, anywhere on the network.
 
I think that pane is showing you where your account's information is stored and it is dimmed because you cannot change where this particular account stores this information. For most users this is also the location of all your actual email files. I read that individual mailboxes (the folders for organizing your mail are called mailboxes) can be set up to be stored in other places. But I am guessing when you set up the account initially it allowed you to set up this master location, or that the Mac OS requires all the accounts have to have their master location in the same place so that you can administer them from the Mail appllication preferences.
 
I've been doing this via a POP account for decades. An option
in Eudora says to leave the mail on the server for X days (I
find that 15 is good). Any of our four Macs will get mail "new
to it" as long as you check mail on it every week or so.
 
Cam: seems like the Account Directory defaults to your local user even when setting up a new account; there's no option to enter a different location. So what's the point?

albloom: your arrangement is OK for reading mail, but mail you've sent will only be visible on the Mac it was sent from (unless you cc yourself each time, but who can remember to do that?).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top