Hi

I'm after some advice on how to set up my mail configuration. I have a little bit of experience (I have once set up sendmail on a server I was responsible for), and have used a variety of bits of email stuff. But I am not sure what the best solution is in this case -- or even what the options are.

First of all, the current setup. My desktop machine at work runs Ubuntu and I use the Evolution email client. I fetchmail my email from my work IMAP server which runs Windows Exchange. All of my local email folders on my desktop are straight mbox. Ancient, I know, but I can grep and gzip and all that good, simple, robust stuff. I travel a great deal and have a Mac and an Android phone. On both of those I ssh in to my desktop and run (wait for it) (al)pine (yes, yes, I know I should prefer mutt. But I don't!). My desktop machine runs behind an enterprise firewall. I have negotiated to have an intermediate machine that I can ssh into from outside, and then I ssh hop from there to my desktop.

This is a bulletproof robust setup but it is a real pain -- specifically, when I lose my 3G/GPRS connection from my phone, or I'm out of wifi connection on my Mac, I can't process email at all. What I would like is to have local mail clients on my Mac and phone that cache my email and where I can both process and file email offline and then when I get a connection back, all of my sendable emails and filing actions sync with the server. I like the simplicity and unbreakability of mbox and I like to be able to use (al)pine and ssh if nothing else works (e.g. if I'm in some internet cafe).

So, lots of interesting problems here: I can't run a simple webmail server on my desktop because it's not accessible through the firewall. I don't like trusting everything to M$ Exchange, particularly because I can't manipulate all my historical email locally in *nix robust style. I need clients that are robust in the face of syncing (even in a multiple-client context). I'd rather not trust to Google or similar because some of my email is sensitive (I guess I also have a bit of an irrational preference for managing my own email, particularly the historical files).

I'm not excluding any possibilities, and am happy to rejig pretty much everything. And of course, I may well have missed the obvious solutions. So, what would you do?

Looking forward to interesting options,

chris.