Doug Lerner wants to take Mail.app and his messages with him and plug it into any Mac he can find.

He posts in the Apple Discussions:

Apparently Thunderbird supports a “portable mailbox” feature. In other words, you can keep your mail on a USB RAM drive, and just plug it in to whatever computer you are using – Mac or Windows – and Thunderbird just uses that mailbox instead of one on your HD.

My friend’s USB RAM was only 2GB and he was getting worried about reaching capacity, so he started using his 20GB iPod instead, which works just as well.

I wonder if such a thing is possible with Apple’s Mail app.

Naturally, the idea that Thunderbird can do anything better than Mail.app sends me into a frenzy.

Clever people have developed a couple of ways to use Mail.app on memory sticks or iPods.

Portable Mail is a clever hack that opens a local copy of Mail.app on whatever Mac you are using with preferences stored on a USB stick. If the stick is big enough to cal also store your Mail folder and everything else on it as well.

Developer Carlo Gandolfi has recently released SyncPAppsX , a helper app that syncs the local and portable settings for a range of his portable iApps including Portable Mail, making it even easier not to miss a beat. Nice.

Jeffrey Glover has worked out a way to store his Mail and Mail Downloads on an iPod. By creating some symbolic links, he shows you how to force Mail to use the messages on the iPod, regardles of which Mac it is plugged into.

Obviously, by creating different symbolic links, you could move the Mail folder to any remote volume, a network drive perhaps, and so share the same messages between two or more Macs on the one network. It’s an interesting way to share POP messages between multiple Macs, although I wouldn’t want to guess what would happen if more than one Mac was writing to the Mail folder at the same time.mail.app, apple mail, portable apps, usb stick, memory stick, ipod, mobility, productivity, thunderbird

Two quick Thunderbird things:

1. FreeSMUG has posted a portable build of Thunderbird 1.5 that you can put on a memory stick or any other portable medium.

   You will need at least 33 MB of free space, but you can then take your Thunderbird with you (complete with emails and contacts) and use it on any Mac.

2. The Mozilla Wiki carries news of progress towards a version of Thunderbird that will run on the new Intel Macs.

   The article describes what needs to be done, how they are going to do it, and also links to the latest Intel Mac builds of Thunderbird, Firefox and Camino.

Now Mozilla users can enjoy portable browsing and email.

It would be very cool to see something similar for Mail.app.

You can put your Mail folder on an iPod or memory stick and use Apple Mail on whatever Mac you have to hand, but that’s nowhere near as elegant a solution.