KMail - can I collect mail from machine on LAN?

[Timothy Murphy]

I have a small home LAN.
I get my email by uucp through my college.
At present I collect this mail on my laptop;
but I would prefer to collect it on my desktop,
and then read it on my laptop (through WiFi).

My question is: I am running KMail on my laptop.
Currently I look for mail in /var/spool/mail .
Is there any way I could look for mail on my desktop,
ie on a remote machine,
without running an IMAP server or something like that
on the desktop?

I had hoped I could say (in KMail=>Settings=>Network=>Receiving)
that I was receiving mail locally,
but then give a remote address on my LAN,
but that doesn't appear to be possible.

Is there some general programming technique (like named pipes)
which would allow a remote address to appear to be local?

Any suggestions gratefully received.
If I do have to run a mail server on my desktop,
what is the best one, eg IMAP or POP3?

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland