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I have used console based email exclusively, and continuously, since 1993, with (al)pine. It is tremendously efficient and works very well over low bandwidth l

by rsync 11y ago

I have used console based email exclusively, and continuously, since 1993, with (al)pine. It is tremendously efficient and works very well over low bandwidth links which, even in 2015, one encounters from time to time. The key aspect of this setup, however, is that no mail is stored locally at all - I connect to a co-located server (you could also use a VPS) over SSH and run alpine on the remote system. Two very nice things are accomplished here: 1. No email on my local system - nothing to lose, nothing to be confiscated or intercepted or lost. 2. Many, many emails do not traverse the Internet at all. If I send email to an rsync.net coworker, that email is nothing but a local copy operation - it never travels across any network. So I am excited and interested to see a console email client like this, especially since (al)pine is not really maintained and has fallen behind a bit in usability ... but I question the use-case of running it locally.

jaromilrojo 11y ago
Hi there and thanks for your interest. I also started writing emails with Pine, straight after using Portal of Power as a pre-Internet BBS point ;^) Now keep in mind Jaro Mail is just a rather big wrapper around mutt / fetchmail / msmtp / notmuch with special support for generating sieve filters used by dovecot2. Credits are well due to all these programs for lasting so long and working well. As I describe it in the manual, the primary use of JaroMail is to keep email local, yes. But as you well mention here there are situations in which it is very handy to have emails stored (or perhaps temporarily moved) on a server. Jaro Mail so far works also in those situations, substituting the support for OSX-keyring and gnome-keyring with a simple "local keyring" storage using symmetrically encrypted (GPG) entries in an sqlite db. I'm not super-happy about that, but it works for now, it may change in the future. Anything else is just the same, local or remote. To facilitate moving the stash around I use a Tomb which contains all what's needed - kudos to ZSh for being so lovely and portable, summed up to the small and very common unix programs used, you can imagine I never had a problem moving my setup around on desktops and servers really. Please also note the difference between the 'peek' and the 'fetch' commands: you don't always need to use the latter, so one can have duplicate setups on servers where only peek is used and nothing is downloaded. Or perhaps one can fetch using the "keep" option as same options as fetchmailrc are supported per-account...
rakoo 11y ago
There are some reasons to run things locally: * when your network is not so good, and the connection is laggy * when your network is inexistent but you still want to read mails/write them so they can be sent the next time you're online I can only assume that you always have a connection and it is always good enough to "feel" local, or that you don't need permanent access to it ?

by rsync 11y ago

jaromilrojo 11y ago

Hi there and thanks for your interest. I also started writing emails with Pine, straight after using Portal of Power as a pre-Internet BBS point ;^) Now keep in mind Jaro Mail is just a rather big wrapper around mutt / fetchmail / msmtp / notmuch with special support for generating sieve filters used by dovecot2. Credits are well due to all these programs for lasting so long and working well. As I describe it in the manual, the primary use of JaroMail is to keep email local, yes. But as you well mention here there are situations in which it is very handy to have emails stored (or perhaps temporarily moved) on a server. Jaro Mail so far works also in those situations, substituting the support for OSX-keyring and gnome-keyring with a simple "local keyring" storage using symmetrically encrypted (GPG) entries in an sqlite db. I'm not super-happy about that, but it works for now, it may change in the future. Anything else is just the same, local or remote. To facilitate moving the stash around I use a Tomb which contains all what's needed - kudos to ZSh for being so lovely and portable, summed up to the small and very common unix programs used, you can imagine I never had a problem moving my setup around on desktops and servers really. Please also note the difference between the 'peek' and the 'fetch' commands: you don't always need to use the latter, so one can have duplicate setups on servers where only peek is used and nothing is downloaded. Or perhaps one can fetch using the "keep" option as same options as fetchmailrc are supported per-account...

rakoo 11y ago

There are some reasons to run things locally: * when your network is not so good, and the connection is laggy * when your network is inexistent but you still want to read mails/write them so they can be sent the next time you're online I can only assume that you always have a connection and it is always good enough to "feel" local, or that you don't need permanent access to it ?