Hi!
I have to linux distributions on my PC; Fedora Core 2 and Gentoo 2004.1. I would like to set up my e-mail client ( Evolution or Thunderbird ) so that they would both share same inbox folder. For instance I have fedora on hda5 and gentoo on hda6. Both have Evolution and Thunderbird installed. Is it possible to set either one of them so that they would share same inbox folder ( and all other ) on hda7?

Best regards
George

i don't know if that will give any problems with the installed mta's but one simple solution (that i havn't tried;-) would be to mount a (small) single partition as /var/mail/username (your local email spool, that's where you get your mails delivered to. you then have to fetch it with your mailing program) on both systems.
another way could be to just copy your emails everytime at startup to the specific folder.
that will work for you mail-spool.

your mailfolder (where all your inbox/outbox/trash/.. are) is stored in your homedirectory. it depends on the program you use for edititing/composing/looking to mail how it's layout is. i don't know about evolution since i use another, but if both versions are the same it (maybe - i havn't tried it so far) should give you the same mailfolder for both systems by just moving that folder to the linux you currently use.

sl mritch.

well....at least Thunderbird has (in Account options or prefences, whatever) an option that defines "local directory"..I could imagine this is where the received messages are saved. so the only thing you would have to do is to have both distros share some directory and then set both use that as their local directory...I am not sure about this but as I said, I could imagine this so

so, you could for instance make a small trick so that one of your distros would use some directory, and then in the other distro define that directory to be mounted at boot into some location on your filesystem...

here's an example: let's say you would have a directory called /home/mails/mailbox and that would reside in your hda3 (completely imaginary situation). now you would set your first distro's mailclient to use that directory to save it's mails...then you would open your other distro and do some stuff so it would mount (from hda3) the directory /home/mails/mailbox, and mount it to the filesystem to /home/mails/mailbox that would be in hda4, for example....so the directories would be the same, but only so that the first one would exist in hda3 partition, and the other directory would only be a _mount_ of the otherone, mounted into hda4....that is, if you can't directly use the hda3 location to store mails. and remember, this hda3/hda4/mailbox-stuff was only my imaginary example... but in a few words: just handle things so you can access some directory in some partition from both distros without problems (ie permissionproblems) and set both clients use that dir.

I haven't done this and all this I wrote is based only on my own thoughts..I can't guarantee it works probably even won't, but that's the idea I have about this.

good luck...I know what you ask is possible. basically pretty much everything is...it's just to find the way

What I have done in the past is create a /home/share directory (not a user). I will copy the Mail, evolution, News ect directories to that directory and replace them in the home directories of each distro with a symlink to these folders. That way no matter which distro is booted up it is symlinked to the same folder. You will of course have to have the same username and uid or handle the permissions some other way. If this is your box only a chmod 777 would work. Some time the default uid starts @ 1000 (Slackware) or 500 (SuSE RH etc). This has caused some issues for me in the past when I did not take it into account.

HTH