Remote usage

X11 remote display

As any X-Window client application, manitou can run on one machine and displays on another as long as the latter runs an X11 server accepting the connection.
This is done with the -display argument.
Example:

$ manitou -display workstation1:0

SSH tunneling

Since manitou is also an SQL client application, it can run locally on any workstation and connect to its remote PostgreSQL mail database. However, for security reasons, database servers are often not accessible from anywhere but their network neighborhood.

If you're allowed to use ssh to connect to a machine in the local network or even the database server itself, ssh tunneling can be used by following these two steps:

1) connect with ssh to a machine authorized to connect to the server, specifying a local port forwarding, like this:

ssh machine.domain.tld -L3333:pgserver.domain.tld:5432

What happens under the hood is that ssh will relay TCP packets from localhost:3333 to machine.domain.tld inside its own connection, and then on the endpoint, from machine.domain.tld to pgserver.domain.tld:5432.
3333 can be replaced by whatever TCP port is available on your local machine. Also machine.domain.tld can be pgserver.domain.tld if you can and want connect via ssh to the database server directly instead of a satellite machine. In any case, leave the ssh connection open until you quit the manitou user interface.

Under MS-Windows, putty is a popular free ssh client that allows tunneling.

2) run manitou locally with localhost as the database server and 3333 as the port number. Example:

manitou --dbcnx "host=localhost port=3333 dbname=....." [other options]

Note that this way of connecting remotely through a ssh tunnel work in the general case, not just for accessing a Manitou-Mail database. See the PostgreSQL manual, that has dedicated page on this topic, or the ssh manual for more explanations or troubleshooting hints.