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Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:51:05 GMT

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Portable email across operating system platforms

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:39:00 GMT

One of the things we need to deal with in Niger is how to get email in areas that either have no internet access at all, or very poor internet access. Especially for the areas with no internet access, traditionally we have used something called sneaker mail, in which emails can be shuttled back and forth on a usb stick (or floppies not that long ago!) to be read on the remote computer using the Pegasus email client. While this worked, Pegasus is not all that user friendly, especially with newer formatted mails, and has weird tenancies to send attachments in outdated encodings by default.

In SIM Niger, we have moved to Thunderbird Portable for most of these situations. Thunderbird Portable is a whole email client, address book, and if you add the lightning addon calendar, in one folder that you can move from computer to computer. You can even run the application from a USB thumb drive. Using this then, it is easy to use the mail, move it to a usb stick, take the stick into town where there is an internet connection, download the new mail, and take the stick back to your remote location and you have everything still in the folder, ready to use.

The only problem with this system is that Thunderbird Portable is a MS Windows based application, and does not run natively on other platforms. I have used this same system with Linux machines for a few years now using the open source compatibility layer called wine. With a modern Linux distribution (such as Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora, or LinuxMint) the wine program installs with a few clicks, and is pre-configured to launch windows based applications simply by clicking on the application icon. Since the 0.8x version of wine, Thunderbird Portable has worked very well in Linux, thereby allowing a linux user to use Portable Thunderbird between Linux and Windows machines seamlessly.

There are now at least 3 Macs in the SIM Niger world, but only recently has the issue come up as how to do Portable Thunderbird on a Mac. There is a version of wine for Mac, but it is not far enough along to be an out of the box solution. The answer comes from a company that is taking wine code, improving it, and then returning the code improvements back into the open source version of wine. The company is CodeWeavers. They have a product called Crossover Office for both Linux and Mac. I have used the Linux version in the past to get MS Office to work better under Linux, and it works very well. (As a side note, in most instances now, OpenOffice is now mature enough to use for daily office work, even when exchanging documents with MS Office users) The Mac version of Crossover Office worked as advertised and Thunderbird Portable worked flawlessly on the Mac. The Mac version of Crossover Office is about $40 US, and a 30 day trial is available. The installation instructions on the site are great, and I would be doing a disservice trying to recreate them here.

The advantage of a compatibility layer on Linux or Mac, instead of a dual boot environment or a virtual machine environment is that there is much less overhead (Some MS Windows applications have been shown to run faster under wine then running natively in MS Windows itself!), less configuration issues, no rebooting or waiting for another OS to boot, and seamless cut and paste between applications. Thunderbird Portable (and other portable applications) are superb solutions for those in remote areas, and those on the go.

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Sat, 10 Jan 2009 11:43:00 GMT

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