Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

chasg · Feb 7, 2007, 06:57 AM

Hi All,

I recently signed up with a .Mac account for several reasons, one of which was it would allow me to sync Mail between two Macs.

Well, I _thought_ that syncing would mean that both machines would have all of the messages as well as account info. As I use POP to get my mail, having just the account info on the second machine isn't all that useful.

So, can anybody suggest how I can keep the two copies of Mail _completely_ sync'ed? The only solutions I've come up with so far are to manually sync (using, say, Deja vu) the two Mail:Mailboxes folders, or to use aliases. I've gone through this before when I was using Eudora (from which I recently switched to Mail so that I could have sync'ing via .Mac...), not really efficient, and prone to problems.

I _do_ like how I can have iCal completely sync'ed, this is what I was hoping I'd get with Mail too :-(

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Chas

cgc · Jul 3, 2007, 07:14 PM

How do you synk iCal between two Macs? I have Synk Pro and could use that but is there amore elegant solution?

shiff · Jul 3, 2007, 10:18 PM

You may want to check this product out.

http://www.markspace.com/synctogether.php

I have not personally used this product but I have used some of his other products and they work as advertised.

besson3c · Jul 3, 2007, 10:21 PM

Switch to using IMAP. It is designed for this purpose, and anything you come up with with POP will not be nearly as elegant.

JKT · Jul 4, 2007, 02:33 AM

As besson3c implies, this just isn't possible with POP accounts (you can only ever achieve a rough approximation of it). FWIW, .Mac is an IMAP account so it isn't necessary for it to synch messages and their status between machines as this handled by the IMAP protocol itself. Therefore, there is no need for the .Mac sync to duplicate anything other than your preferences etc for your .Mac account which is why it doesn't do it for anything else either.

chasg · Jul 4, 2007, 03:26 AM

cgc: .Mac has this feature built in (get a .Mac account, turn on sync'ing in iCal, subscribe to those feeds from another computer, and the two, or more, iCal's get sync'ed up).

shiff: thanks for the pointer. I think I'm getting all of that functionality already with .Mac, but thanks anyway.

besson3c: thanks for the suggestion. My .mac account is, of course, already IMAP, but I barely use it for email. I'm going to speak to my ISP about my primary email address, but my main concern is that I do a lot of off-line work (reading, composing etc) that has meant that a POP system has been ideal (barring this sync issue). I will admit that it's been about 8 years since I last looked at IMAP seriously though. I'm going to have to re-learn.

JKT: thanks for that .mac explanation, that clears up some mysteries (I couldn't figure out why the heck it was just sync'ing accounts and settings! Now I know).

Thanks everyone,

Chas

cgc · Jul 4, 2007, 10:16 AM

Getting a .Mac account isn't an ideal option ($99/year).

chasg · Jul 4, 2007, 10:30 AM

Too late! (I've had one for quite a while now, it's convenient in other ways :-)

Chas

besson3c · Jul 4, 2007, 10:49 AM

Originally Posted by chasg

cgc: .Mac has this feature built in (get a .Mac account, turn on sync'ing in iCal, subscribe to those feeds from another computer, and the two, or more, iCal's get sync'ed up).

shiff: thanks for the pointer. I think I'm getting all of that functionality already with .Mac, but thanks anyway.

besson3c: thanks for the suggestion. My .mac account is, of course, already IMAP, but I barely use it for email. I'm going to speak to my ISP about my primary email address, but my main concern is that I do a lot of off-line work (reading, composing etc) that has meant that a POP system has been ideal (barring this sync issue). I will admit that it's been about 8 years since I last looked at IMAP seriously though. I'm going to have to re-learn.

JKT: thanks for that .mac explanation, that clears up some mysteries (I couldn't figure out why the heck it was just sync'ing accounts and settings! Now I know).

Thanks everyone,

Chas

Most IMAP clients support offline viewing. OS X Mail does by default by caching messages for offline viewing. Thunderbird supports offline viewing. Don't know whether Entourage does or not.

JKT · Jul 4, 2007, 03:36 PM

Originally Posted by chasg

I will admit that it's been about 8 years since I last looked at IMAP seriously though. I'm going to have to re-learn.

If you are used to using an IMAP account from Outlook or Outlook Express those 8 years ago, don't let this put you off. They always were dreadful clients when it came to IMAP (quite possibly still are, for all I know).