Rage Against the Mail Sheen

[flwyd]

Linux system administration has gotten a lot easier since I was first introduced ten years ago. However, it just took me the last three hours to...

• Determine what I needed to do for secure IMAP and set it up (easy)
• Find out how to implement pop-before-smtp (fairly straight forward)
• Attempt to yum install pop-before-smtp
• Realize perl module dependencies were missing
• CPAN install missing modules
• Ponder why yum didn't count that as meeting the dependencies
• Determine that my yum distros lacked the necessary modules
• Find a repo with said modules
• yum install pop-before-smtp
• Configure the same
• Download popauth.m4 sendmail hack and configure sendmail
• Configure imap server to log properly
• Try several times to send mail
• Download alternate popauth.m4 hack
• Reload sendmail
• Breathe a sigh of relief as I received 14 messages in my test recipient box.

I'm still not entirely happy with my mail situation for a number of reasons.

• My previously preferred mail client, MH, has technical limitations, so I'm Trying New Things
• Mail.app only runs on MacOS X, and hence only at home
• I'm not very keen on reading my personal email with my work program (Evolution)
• The stable mutt doesn't have a convenient folder list
• Beta mutt folder list doesn't seem to work
• I have grand designs for a MUA I'd prefer, but
• My programming energies that could implement said MUA are expended at work
• And yet I still save all my spam, with the plan to write my own spam filter

So there.

(I could link all of those programs and instructions, but I'm tired and grumpy. I trust your web searching skills on those.)

Comments

[bike4fish.livejournal.com]

Sounds like time for a beer. Actually, right after "Determine that my yum distros lacked the necessary modules" was time for the first beer.

[ihatepavel.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday!

[flwyd.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

So what induced you to finally give up on MH? (I'm still using it, but contemplating a switch to gmail because the imap->fetchmail->spool arrangement I have occasionally drops messages...)

[flwyd.livejournal.com]

inbox+ has 13885 messages ( 1-13886); cur=13886;
cuspam has 11498 messages ( 1-11500); cur= 2767;
cumail has 24533 messages ( 1-24549); cur=23789.
spam has 10963 messages ( 1-10977); cur=10708.

Reason personal: My mail usage pattern has become one of "Read what's in my inbox, then leave it there." When I want to find mail, I take a guess at the date range and do something like grep party Mail/inbox/13???. With 13,000 items in my inbox, a full scan takes a minute or so, so the alias I use does scan cur-last. This means when there's a long email I need to read and respond to, I stop using next until I've dealt with that message. (When I see a message which looks important, I read it with less just in case.) IOW, my mail usage and MH are in some conflict.

Reason technical: MH uses one inode per message in a non-standard format. This means I don't have the option of using multiple clients (e.g. Mail.app for cool Apple features like easily viewing attachments and mutt for universal access). Ideally, I could have incoming messages (assuming I better managed my inbox) stored in (say) maildir for quick access, and then store archive messages in mbox format (to save on inodes when modification is infrequent and searching is more likely). Even more ideally, I would store archive messages in gzipped mbox format (or maildir.tar.gz) to save on inodes and space. Email, compresses quite well.

What I would really like is a command line mail interface which is storage-independent. A standardized compressed mail format would be nice too, but I would be OK if it only worked with the CLI MUA.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that reason technical is easy to solve. MH does read mbox format, doesn't it? You might need to set up different command aliases for dealing with active mail and archived mail, but that's possibly even an advantage.

Also, do you know the 'pick' command? I like it better than grep, now that I've gotten used to it. But it still gets slow on 2k+ messsages. (I'm drifting towards having only two folders, inbox and archive, but I'm just as bad about managing to keep my inbox as empty as I should.)

I want to upload my whole email archive to gmail, but I have to go through and hand-add datestamps to a number of messages that are missing them before I do, because otherwise there's some stuff that would never filter properly.

[flwyd.livejournal.com]

Hmm. scan -file Mail/testing shows me mbox. show 1 shows the first message. But folder +testing or folder -file Mail/testing doesn't work. In fact, scanning the mbox file and then typing folder takes me back to the inbox. Interesting.

Somehow I had missed the -file option... That makes things... fantastic. If my imap program will play with MH dirs, things get even cooler.

That's the great thing about Unix. There's all sorts of splendiferous solutions to problems you haven't discovered yet.

[flwyd.livejournal.com]

Actually, on further inspection, show 1 shows the first message of inbox... not what we want. -file only appears to work for scan, in fact. Poop.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Aha! But:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mh/book/mh/stormess.htm#SaFiSp
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mh/book/mh/pamiafwp.htm
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mh/book/mh/mhsoamfm.htm

Sounds like using msh would let you do exactly the thing you described, keeping active messages in a maildir, and archived stuff in an mbox file.