Using Apple Mail on 3 Macs, staying in sync (no .mac account)

[mtbdudex]

I did a search and could not find this question.

My situtation:
I have 3 Mac's at home and use Apple Mail. We don't have a .mac account. Both myself and my wife have seperate Yahoo email, we use the Apple Mail app to download that.

Problem is we want just one Mac (the new 24" iMac C2D) to be the "host" and then be able to read/send from any of the 3 Mac's at home. They are on wireless network.
Is that possible easily using Apple mail? I know not a server based solution, can I run the iMac Apple Mail app remotely form the other Mac's? Obvious problem is reading/sending from each Mac makes email filing/organization a headache.

 

[blodwyn]

I did a search and could not find this question.

My situtation:
I have 3 Mac's at home and use Apple Mail. We don't have a .mac account. Both myself and my wife have seperate Yahoo email, we use the Apple Mail app to download that.

Problem is we want just one Mac (the new 24" iMac C2D) to be the "host" and then be able to read/send from any of the 3 Mac's at home. They are on wireless network.
Is that possible easily using Apple mail? I know not a server based solution, can I run the iMac Apple Mail app remotely form the other Mac's? Obvious problem is reading/sending from each Mac makes email filing/organization a headache.

IMAP accounts solve this problem. One way to handle this is to open a GMail account and have your Yahoo emails forwarded to the GMail account (a Mail rule could do this). Then you just set your Mac's to use the GMail account via IMAP.

There are other solutions - I have a Fastmail account which sucks emails from all of my various email accounts into a single Inbox, which I then access through IMAP from any of my systems.

 

[jsgreen]

I second the Fastmail recommendation - terrific service provided at a reasonable price ($40 USD per year for an "enhanced" account).

They are very focused on email delivery, though. Don't expect snazzy graphic-loaded web interface (which doesn't matter if you use a mail client).

 

[everettmarshall]

Amen to IMAP.

And you might not have to do the Gmail forwarding. It seems that Yahoo is providing IMAP access. Although I cannot verify the functionality, I did find this:

http://yahoo.weblogsinc.com/2006/06/24/yahoo-mail-getting-free-imap-access/

I use Gmail IMAP for all of my email now because it works so well. You can even host your own domains email service with Gmail now. For us, IMAP keeps 3 Macs and an iPhone synched with 10 email accounts.

 

[Huntn]

Hi all.

I too am trying to figure out a way to keep Mail synched between two computers (desktop G5/Tiger & MacBookPro/Leopard) without using a Mac.com account.

I'm able to keep my Library>Mail folder synched between the two computers, and I know about the apple mail plist file in Library>Preferences. However when I moved the Mail folder, my smart folders did not move too. Having to setup smart folders twice will be a lot of work for me.

Can anyone tell me where the smart folder data is kept?
Thanks!

 

[Cromulent]

There are other solutions - I have a Fastmail account which sucks emails from all of my various email accounts into a single Inbox, which I then access through IMAP from any of my systems.

That looks like a pretty neat solution. Might have to look into it, how reliable is the service?

 

[Huntn]

Hi all.
Can anyone tell me where the smart folder data is kept?
Thanks!

I located it, at least the smart folder plist, in the library>Mail folder. I assume the plist includes the organization of the smart folders as they are not real folders...

Anyway it seems like you can't synch up smart folders directly by moving the plist from the Tiger version of Mail v2, the the Leopard version of Mail v3. At least when I tried it, from Tiger to Leopard, the smart folders did not appear in the Leopard version.