I am looking for alternatives to share my mailbox between different machines. I have a laptop and a desktop. I currently use the desktop for reading the mails alone. (Since I do not wish to mix in with my laptop).

I am looking for possibilities to arrange the mailsystem in somewhat intelligent manner.

What I'd like to do is use POP on both machines and a local mailbox folder.
The problem is that I would need to synchronize in both directions and I could do it only once both machines are running. The problem is that
at the same time I could have new mails in both machines. Is this possible at all - are there some kind of solutions.

Another possibility would be use IMAP on laptop and POP on desktop - this way I could only reach the mails that are still on server but once they are downloaded on desktop I could not access them anymore from laptop.

Of course if I had a fileserver available on net it would be easy to solve
but this I do not have - yet.

So are there any ideas how to achieve it as best with the means I have at the time...?

You can try IMAP on both machines.

Agreed. This is why imap was invented.

That is correct - however, I would be limited with the size of the mailbox. I might of course try to combine IMAP and POP thus every now and then download the old mails to hardrive on both machines - let's say once in the month and then use IMAP for the recent ones...

I usually deal with this problem by establishing an X session via ssh between my laptop and my workstation. Then I just invoke the email client that is on the workstation and display it on the laptop.

Not the best solution if I have a slow connection, but it works.