I use kmail (with maildir) for my e-mail. I often go on the road and take my laptop with me. My e-mail collection is very big pushing 1GB. In the past I've either ignored synchronising e-mail between my laptop and desktop machines (very bad) or I've just copied the whole lot cp -a from one machine to the other - this is very slow. Then I hit upon rsync and today I rsynced from my laptop to my desktop using the option --archive. To my horror on restarting kmail I found that all the mail that had been on the desktop that was not on the laptop had disappeared. Disaster! And more importantly this is not how rsyns is supposed to work. However it turned out that rsync had behaved properly - it hadn't deleted any of the mails that it shouldn't have. What had happened is that the index and index.id files on the desktop had been overwritten by the ones on the laptop. Kmail could no longer 'see' the files. Does anyone have a more elegant solution for synching mail between two computers (kmail or otherwise). Thanks, Jethro