Hi,

Does anyone have experience of storing email inside
dropbox and accessing it successfully from two (or more)
machines?

I download at two places, call them H and W, from the
same gmail account. I have used fetchmail/procmail/mutt
for many years but am now using getmail/procmail/neomutt
on the W machine. Both machines run versions of debian 9.
The procmailrc files are identical, and neomutt on W is
using the same muttrc file as mutt on H.

My problem has two parts.

First, most days, I want to download emails from Inbox at H,
then move them to a folder (say Downed-at-H) and then later
download them from there at W and move them into a folder
`Downed-at-both'.

And at W I'll download the Inbox, then move them to a folder
(Downed-at-W) and then later download them from there at H and
move them into `Downed-at-both'.

This worked well when I had fetchmail on both machines.
It looks a bit complicated when written out but worked well.
It doesn't work with getmail because of the way getmail
removes marks when messages are moved from one folder to
another.

Second part of the problem is that I have about 90k emails
from the past that I want on both machines. Downloading
these a few hundred at a time will probably be acceptable
but doing it twice could be too much for the sysadmins.

If I could go back to fetchmail and good ol' plain mutt
on both machines I would. But debian seems to be against
this.

Hence my question: if I download emails to dirs within
dropbox, will accessing work on both machines? I want to
be able to download to either machine and access all
emails from both. (This is not an easy thing to test.)

Hope you can advise, or maybe point me to more info ...

NF

No, and I won't ever either. Storing E-mail on a "not-controlled by me" place like the dropbox cloud seems rather dangerous to me.
They've had several security problems over the years.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks ehartman. I should have said that I keep backups; I backup my existing dropbox every month to a second internal hd and an external hd (and some parts weekly).

I sometimes find that dropbox alters uppercase to lowercase in filenames. And the timestamp on a file that has gone through dropbox may be altered. This can sometimes be a problem with ordinary files; I guess it could really mess emails up. And the `conflicted copy' system is a good thing for ordinary files but wouldn't work with message files.

Still hoping that someone will tell me that they use dropbox for this and it works perfectly ...

I've been using syncthing for exactly this without having to worrying about cloud services. It syncs various directories on our computers, phones and tablets with each-other and/or our server automatically (when plugged in and on wifi, for the phones and tablets)

Its neither drag and drop simple to set up nor instantaneous but it is solid once the leg work is done

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks, that's very encouraging to know. I've done a basic setup of syncthing on home desktop and laptop today. I'll get a bit more familiar with it first and then see how I go with email in it.