when i travel i access mail from a laptop tethered through the phone. one big advantage of a terminal client is that this works even through a slow connection. especially in combination with mosh
But that means you have to have access to a server that runs constantly (I currently i do that as well for my work mail with muchsync) and you're just one step away from running a Mailserver. I'd like to move away from that solution because it feels hackish and overkill (sync from email server to "server", ssh into server for reading email)
Also I frequently need to search my when e.g. on a plane so the ssh solution doesnt work.
yes, true, i have that server, but i also have a small laptop that i can carry around everywhere. if i needed offline access to mails frequently, i would move email handling to that laptop. and even if i work on another device, i am able to run the laptop on the side and access it through ssh/mosh. in fact i do that for everything else. would that work for you?
Somewhat, but hackish. When I'm at home I use my desktop and if I follow your suggestion I would then have to turn on my laptop first to access my email. I appreciate the suggestions, but I think multi-device offline access is really not a well supported usecase with notmuch unfortunately. I'm sort of hacking around this with different sync options, but it sort of rubs me the wrong way that there is a mail server already, but I essentially have to set up another server (always on machine) to access the email. In the good old days ssh'ing into the mailserver and reading emails directly on the servers maildir made sense (although this still excludes offline work) and changes would also propagate to the server for access via imap. Unfortunately, having ssh access to the emailserver is incredibly rare these days.
it works for me because i have other things that i always want to be available, so yes, i always have that small laptop running on the side.
it's a GPD pocket btw. when that dies i'll probably replace it with a pine-phone, smaller and cheaper, but has a solid keyboard accessory.
i have been thinking about a portable mini-server without keyboard and screen, but i haven't found one that comes with a rechargeable battery instead of requiring external power at all times.
i have considered my active phone, but i don't trust that enough.
> it's a GPD pocket btw. when that dies i'll probably replace it with a pine-phone, smaller and cheaper, but has a solid keyboard accessory.
I had never heard of it and just looked at the GPD pocket 2, quite a neat little machine.
> i have been thinking about a portable mini-server without keyboard and screen, but i haven't found one that comes with a rechargeable battery instead of requiring external power at all times.
I wonder if one could hack one of the mobile hotspots that one can get from several providers nowadays to run some server software. I suspect they run some sort of locked down linux or bsd.
