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Use TBird Portable on secondary systems (home network) to access mail and addresses stored on primary desktop.

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August 27, 2009 - 1:26pm
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tonyadam
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Last seen: 14 years 1 month ago
Joined: 2009-08-27 13:00
Use TBird Portable on secondary systems (home network) to access mail and addresses stored on primary desktop.

I am moving my OUTLOOK mail etc. to TBird on a new desktop with multiple drives and partitions. I will point TBird to store its data on a separate partition and will setup a share on the folders. I think I can make all of that work OK.

My next step though is to be able to use secondary systems in my home (laptops or other desktops which are connected to the home network) to access mail and addresses on the primary system and to send new mail etc. from the secondary systems. I would not be doing this simulataneously though. However, the primary system would likely have TBird running. How do I setup TBird Portable to do this? I've searched the web and your forums but do not have a specific solution. I would think that Portable would be the ideal way since instead of a flash drive, I would be accessing a shared file on the network. Can someone please very specific about how to do this? I have already tried to map a folder and use it in the accounts setting dialog but it doesn't hold. Closing portable just reverts back to its C:\ etc. etc. Your help will be very appreciated. I have already spend numerous hours on this with little success. The product looks like a good solution for my purposes and I would think others would be very interested as well. PS...my ISP does not support IMAP so that is not possible. I have to use POP3.

TonyAdam

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August 28, 2009 - 4:29am
Jimbo
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Joined: 2007-12-17 05:43
two points

Firstly, you cannot run two Thunderbird instances against the same email data at once. It explicitly locks the files to prevent this, so you will definitely have to shut down Thunderbird on the main system to do this.

Secondly, you will be much better of with a standard, non-portable, Thunderbird on the secondary machines for this. The portable ones actively try to update drive letters and settings when you launch them, and so are likely to break the setup that you do.

What you need to do is set up your main Thunderbird, and make a not of where the profile is. Not just the email, but the entire profile.

Next, make sure that this folder is shared, or, if you prefer, use the profile manager to force it into a shared location.

Finally, map a drive to the shared location, and use profile manager on the secondary machine to set the default profile to point at the profile on the network drive, or simply run Thunderbird with the "-profile <path>" parameter.

That should allow you to run a (local to each machine) copy of Thunderbird anywhere, using the central profile in all cases.

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August 28, 2009 - 12:08pm
(Reply to #2)
tonyadam
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Last seen: 14 years 1 month ago
Joined: 2009-08-27 13:00
Mapping a drive

Do I map the drive on the primary or secondary machines? I think I understand everything else and thank you for your clarity. It's too bad that there isn't a product out there that would allow an email engine to be "alive" but not being utilized by the user. Since the machines are in different locations, I'm likely to forget to shut one down when attempting to use another one which means having to go to the primary to shut it down. It would be OK if they were in the same room, but then if that were so, I wouldn't need this function.

TonyAdam

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August 28, 2009 - 8:14pm
(Reply to #3)
ottosykora
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Last seen: 2 days 13 hours ago
Joined: 2007-10-11 17:48
mapping

is done locally on a machine.

The setup you want do is usefull only if you guarantee that only one instance is using it at time. I am doing similar with old outlook setup, but this is on multiboot machine with w98se, w2k and xp which obviously will run only one of them at a time.

For mailstorage on server, yes it works, but then you have to setup real server where profiles are stored there and on logon copied as we have it at office but this is not so simple and it is all MS exchange stuff.

The procedure is approximately: when I log on on machine 1, my profile is copied to the local store on the machine 1. (copying is done by logon script)
When I log on on next machine 2, the profile stored on the server is copied to the local store of macine 2.
I work now on machine 1 modify the profile (mails) , nothing happends on server.
I log out on the machine 1, the profile is copied to the server location overwriting there the original profile.

Then I work on machine 2, do there also some modification to the just local stored profile and log out, the profile from machine 2 will be overwrite the one stored on the server so the work done on machine 1 before might be lost.

Yes I know, there are much better setups, but apparently my boss needs it this way and maintains it for number of years so, and logon on two machines at the same time in the network is very seldom, while still possible by this solution.

This might however illustrate the problems when you would try to achieve what you want achieve. So be careful, it is all very tricky.

Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland

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